Etiket yuksel arslan

Ferhat Jak Icoz On a rainy fall day, with a friend we decided to spend our two-hour break at the Contemporary Arts Museum of SantralIstanbul, without knowing what was expecting us. My friend commented to persuade me that ‘the exhibition is quite striking, interesting, and even mind-blowing’. As we approached to the end of our break, we were able to be done only with the first floor (top floor) of the exhibition, so I decided to come back for a more extensive and intensive exploration of Yuksel Arslan. Yuksel Arslan, 76 year old artist, a controversial and intellectually futuristic figure, has exiled himself to Paris 40 years ago. During these 40 years, his fame flourished as an artist, however he remained quite mysterious for Turkish art-lovers. And after such a long exile, Arslan came back home, to Halic, where he was born, and now, where he has his retrospective exhibition, at the Contemporary Arts Museum of SantralIstanbul. Doubtlessly, media loved the Turkish-drama like story of this man, who left his hometown as a poor, unknown artist, and is making a homecoming as an artist of international fame, after proving himself to be one of the most important art figures in the world. Indeed, there is no need to barely mention about Arslan’s biographical story, as the exhibition arranged in a way, that you both learn about the biography of Arslan, witnessing the processes and evolutions, and sometimes revolutions, Arslan underwent, as an artist. On the first floor of the exhibition (third floor), childhood and adolescence years of Arslan come up. As a child of factory worker from Anatolia, who fought at Balkan, Independence and WWI wars, he grew up in Eyup, where cemeteries dominate the view. Hence, gravestones were like toys to Arslan. Another great interest of Arslan’s was sexuality […]