Aykan Safoğlu: Taurus

Aykan Safoğlu: Taurus / curated by Linnéa Bake

Istanbul, May 2023. A shared research, a protagonist cast in bronze, a site of an affective archaeology. A wound, a tear. The bull statue of Kadıköy, according to one of several historical versions, was acquired by the Ottoman sultan Abdülaziz in the late 1860s as part of a collection of animal sculptures in France, and arrived via various stops at its current location, a public square on the Asian side of Istanbul. Today, demonstrations regularly take place here; press releases are recited, and civic political will is expressed. In his solo exhibition Taurus, Aykan Safoğlu thematically and formally takes up concepts such as value, guilt or debt, and historical liability by means of encountering such public sculptures and memorials. In a tactile engagement with the animal statues as silent witnesses of current and past political events, their role as a surface for diverse symbolic or concrete-political projections is artistically explored, dispersed, and reassembled.