All Saints is a large scale sculptural painting commissioned by The Boiler@ELM Foundation as part of their guest artist program. I moved into this extraordinary space for four months and created the piece specifically for the space. It's in essence a block party painting that has gone through processes of abstraction dealing with the plague and the public spaces of dance and protest.

For this project at the Boiler, I looked into public dancing as a space of joy, revolt, and acknowledgement of life and death. Dancing in the time of pandemic can be traced back to the Middle Ages. For instance, death dance pictures created during the bubonic plague in Europe feature people from different status and social class dancing hand in hand with skeletons, acknowledging the proximity of life and death. A little later, Brueghel’s depiction of town dances establishes a similar connection between euphoria and madness at times of crisis. The block party, a particularly dear phenomenon in New York, can be understood as the modern version with its history of bringing a whole neighborhood together on the street.

Affected by the ongoing pandemic and inspired by the collective longing for bodily expressions, I strived to create a connection between my ongoing Riot_Fire series that focuses on the potential of street fires started during uprisings around the world and his exploration of dance in this large scale work for The Boiler.

It felt great to contribute to the NYC Public Art Fund’s Art On The Grid project. Works were displayed in multiple displays in bus stations, digital info-boards and billboards across the city and in different neighborhoods. The access level between art and public this project created made a lot of sense to me in connection to my work that references the potential of public space and collective action.

I’m interested in a particular mode of seeing: Seeing through, seeing beyond, seeing behind, seeing despite, seeing in the dark… These modes, of course, have to do with a political condition and in response to affairs in my native Turkey as well as the United States. I am also interested in finding a formal process and a visual outcome in my work that reflects these modes of seeing on a materially tangible surface.

It can be tricky. I am tempted to think that artists, just like people in general, should take part in activist movements as their duty to participatory democracy as well as to their own sense of responsibility towards accomplishing justice, equality and environmental sustainability in society. However I also think the artwork should preserve a certain sense of autonomy and freedom in finding form to ideas in its own way. In a nutshell, artists should be activists and art should be autonomous.

It should be enough to participate in the world beyond a secluded studio practice, have questions about the world at large and the rest will manifest itself inevitably in the work. I am for a type of autonomy in the work informed by larger events but not dictated by them in a strictly driven format. There are many subtleties in visual language that social and political positions can be expressed in a distinctive way. That is why we need art; for a unique angle and a type of understanding of complex issues.