LACK OF WHOLENESS / TERMINAL 08 / 2023

Dear visitor,

We are living in barbarian times. When I say barbarian times, I’m not referring to the conflicts that we are living through around the world. They are not surprising. This world has always been bloody and outrageous.

We are living in barbarian times because we all have a little “Stalin” inside. We know better than everyone else; everything we do and think is right. Well, we think that we think. But we do not. We are just reacting. The ones who are not like us, we don’t listen to them, they are just useless people. We are all tiny “Putins” not just to other people but ourselves too. At the same time, we behave like we are UN representatives who must declare their opinions to the rest of the world in a short time, because the world is waiting for our opinions immediately. And we do it in a very strange way. We declare some opinions first and then look for the evidence to justify them. Don’t you think that we appreciate ourselves more than we deserve? Who cares about our opinions? Who is asking for them?

We are familiar with the divisions caused by social media and our technological gadgets, but it is not the whole story. It is true that we are all living in our own algorithms thousands of light years distance from other people. We are all small, tiny, funny dictators in our micro worlds without understanding that we are numbers to the others: to big corporations, to governments, to established power. We are just tools, dear visitor.

In these days we are all divided, converted into individualistic, selfish, and senseless beings.

So, keeping this in mind, in this exhibition I bring foreword the idea of a general “Lack of Wholeness” in three different ways. At first, all artworks individually must represent the idea of the lack of wholeness. Then, between the works, I create a lack of integrity. And finally, I create a total sense of the lack of wholeness, visually and conceptually similar to the experience we have when we use the Internet to get information, for example when we search on YouTube burned children in some war, before we get that information, first we have to watch an ultra-bio-efficient body cream protecting us from old age or a happy family eating healthy yoghurt. In my opinion, that kind of confusion and emotional experience creates in today’s individuals what I was referring to above: the lack of wholeness.

Volkan Diyaroglu