26 April – 23 June 2019
UKS

EXHIBITION
ÖZGÜR KAR: A NEW START

Opening: Friday, 26 April, 6–8pm
Exhibition: 27 April – 23 June 2019
After party: 8pm–2am at Kunstnernes Hus
Interview: Read UKS’ interview with Özgür Kar here

Please join us for the opening of Amsterdam-based Özgür Kar’s first Scandinavian solo exhibition A New Start on Friday, 26 April, 6–8pm. After the vernissage, UKS joins forces with Oslo Open, 8392, and Atelier Nord to host a grand party at Kunstnernes Hus, celebrating our respective openings as well as the launch of this year’s Oslo Open—a weekend of around four-hundred open artist studios in Oslo!

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Coming from drawing and graphic design, Özgür Kar’s (b. 1992, TR) recent work concentrates on black-and-white video animations. Kar sketches out human figures squeezed into the confined frame of giant flat screens. Whispering monologues of nonsense, tragedy, homoeroticism, and pulp, these characters summon contemporary tales poised between libido and longing.

While rooting his inspiration in sources spanning MTV late-night adult animations of the early 1990s, motifs borrowed from Turkish folk tradition, slow-motion renderings of solipsist rants by Samuel Beckett, and humorous and gory X-rated cartoons out of New York in the 1970s, Kar’s primary material is that of social media. His characters are caught in portrait-format—the tablet or smart-phone screen—nearly motionless in their claustrophobic cache. Stenciled out as white lines on black backgrounds, the simple, stop-motion-like avatars are drenched in darkness, both emotional and factual.

In his new, large-scale work—produced for this exhibition at UKS—Kar for the first time connects a series of screens into one joint narrative. Across four human-sized panels, a single character’s different traits are played out, hummed, and discussed, exploring the range of “identities” of the figure—as a schizophrenic choir, calling out.

 

BIOGRAPHY:
Özgür Kar lives and works in Amsterdam. He is a graduate from Gerrit Rietveld Academie and currently a resident at Amsterdam’s Rijksakademie van Beeldende kunsten. Recent exhibitions and screenings include Finally you are in me at Taylor Macklin, Zurich (2017), a group presentation at the Cruising Pavilion at the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale (2018), and the group exhibitions Noise! at Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem (2018), Full Spectrum Dominance at Decad, Berlin (2017), Mene Mene Tekel Parsin at Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge (2017), and Ugly Feelings at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2017).

 

PRESS:

— Review in Subjekt (online journal)
Sterkt om selvbildet i en digital hverdag, Subjekt, 07.05.2019

— Review in Klassekampen (newspaper)
Kom litt nærmere, Klassekampen, 08.05.2019

— Review in Kunstkritikk (online journal)
Elendige meg, Kunstkritikk, 08.05.2019

 

Images from the opening of Özgür Kar’s exhibition, “A New Start”, at UKS on 26 April 2019. All photos by UKS (Young Artists’ Society)

Özgür Kar: “A New Start”

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