Ballon Rouge at Hannah Barry Gallery, London
I remember;
with Merve İşeri, Jean Feline, & Lara Ögel
September 25 - November 2, 2019
“the places in which we have experienced day-dreaming reconstitute themselves in a new day-dream, and it is because our memories of former dwelling-places are re-lived as day-dreams these dwelling-places of the past remain in us for all time.”
- Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
I remember; is an exhibition about the day-dream of a place once lived in or imagined. It is about the body in those spaces both actual and imaginary, and it is nostalgic and nihilist about its own nostalgia.
Merve İşeri’s works on canvas are day-dreams encapsulated, representations of half-remembered, embodied and outer body experiences. The sometimes soft outlines are mixed with frames, hard and assured lines. Sometimes there is simply space and there appears to be forms human or otherwise. These forms hover in the ground of the canvas, a ground that may be common to both but in constant movement; the relationship between them, like the daydream itself, is fragile but pulsing with energy.
Jean Feline’s works vary in media from drawing to sculpture and installation. Each work, whether through scale or functionality of the thing represented and re-formed, plays with the idea of personal, cultural and historical memory; and too, plays with ideas surrounding how we live with objects and inhabit spaces and how objects themselves have a memory. A perfect example of the way an object, like a person, can have a day-dream-like memory is the Tam Tam stool designed by Henry Massonnet in 1968 - a chair which features prominently in the body of works Jean presents here.
Lara Ögel’s installation, video, sound, and works on paper also speak to the memory of and in objects as well as the lives lived and living that relate to them. In an installation of a time-worn bedroom, with earth overtaking and grass growing, Lara’s suggestion of a bed is noted only with ceramic paw foundations and wooden bars. Each made by hand and from memory the paws reference both her personal memory of a home once lived-in but also the muscle memory of and in making and remembering itself. The reliance on a day-dream state that takes you to a final form and feels like a memory brought to life.
This exhibition is part of Ballon Rouge Collective's Club, an exchange program whereby we invite international galleries to take over our space in Brussels and we do the same in their home-town space. Hannah Barry Gallery is currently showing an exhibition by PROUDICK, (Lindsey Mendick and Paloma Proudfoot) at our space in Brussels until October 19th.
Merve İşeri (b. 1992, Istanbul) lives and works in London. She is a painter working mostly on unprimed canvas, cotton, and paper. Merve graduated from Politecnico di Milano in Communication Design in 2014, and has shown works since 2015 in shows in Belgium, Italy, Turkey, USA, and UK. She has had two solo exhibitions with Ballon Rouge Collective; one in September 2017 in Istanbul and again in April 2019 in Brussels. Her work has been published in The Financial Times, Harper’s Bazaar Turkey, and Huffington Post, among others.
Jean Feline (b. 1989, Nîmes ) lives and works in London and Marrakech. He is a graduate of the Chelsea College of Art in London and studied at The Cooper Union in New York. Jean's practice encompasses a range of different media from drawing, painting, three-dimensional works, video and print. His work exists within the corners of specific sites and plants familiar objects in unfamiliar contexts to evoke a complexity of perspectives. His sensitivity towards human and non-human forms of consciousness create a horizontal and non-hierarchical reading of these positions. Using everyday objects and referencing the realm of the common, the omnipresence of materials in Jean’s work are at once intimate and anonymous. He has shown work in London, Paris, Berlin, New York, Milan and during the Marrakech Biennale.
Lara Ögel (b. 1987, Izmir) lives and works in Istanbul. Ögel works in a variety of mediums from video, sculpture and works on paper to create site and context aware works. She is interested in site specificity and context specificity. Her wide range of production develops from a personal perspective and embodies larger universal concerns, often highlighting the vernacular of our time by using found objects and images and expending their contexts. She received her bachelorette degree in Screen Studies from Clark University in Worcester, MA. Ögel attended the Intensive Summer Foundation at Slade School of Fine Art in London. She's participated in artist residencies in PRAKSIS (Oslo) and Beirut Art Residency (Beirut). She's shown works in Istanbul, Beirut, Hasselt, Paris, Leipzig, Basel, Athens, Porto, New York and Amsterdam.