Nancy Atakan : scent of time

Overview
Nancy Atakan, Searching for the scent of time, 2022, Mixed media: antique cloth, felt, embroidery, 150x150 cm
Nancy Atakan, Searching for the scent of time, 2022, Mixed media: antique cloth, felt, embroidery, 150x150 cm

Pi Artworks is pleased to present Scent of Time, Nancy Atakan’s 8th solo exhibition with the gallery, featuring her watercolour paintings inspiring her needlework that touches upon revisiting, rethinking and reimagining in light of a subjective experience of time.

Scent of Time revolves around the construction of time in individual consciousness, an amalgam of our perception, memory and imagination defying the irrevocable passage of time by the arbitrary numbers on a clock while forming a unity of all experiences for the self. This unique construction, born out of insight, is explored throughout the exhibition mimicking a cyclical structure of time, “thoughts on thoughts” overlapping and lingering just like scent does.

For this exhibition, watercolour paintings made several decades earlier - fragmented images of a personal history – are brought together on the background cloth of needlework, some of the materials of which were presented as a gift or collected throughout the years. Such as the one, “Window of Time”, a cloth collage composed of gifted Turkish embroidery on a fabric bought in an Indian market was inspired by a watercolour made by Atakan in 1983 that she named “Window”.

Forming the backbone of the exhibition, “Searching for the Scent of Time” made in 2022 is a revisit to the time when Nancy was collecting antique table clocks from flea markets while being followed through the lens of filmmaker Dilek Aydın, for a documentary in the making about the artist. Throughout the show, those clocks appear in different mediums - on handkerchiefs, in a video, as a part of a sculpture - as symbolic and material objects, each opening an illusory window in time to the intangible place of memories.

Works
Press release

Pi Artworks is pleased to present Scent of Time, Nancy Atakan’s 8th solo exhibition with the gallery, featuring her watercolour paintings inspiring her needlework that touches upon revisiting, rethinking and reimagining in light of a subjective experience of time.

Scent of Time revolves around the construction of time in individual consciousness, an amalgam of our perception, memory and imagination defying the irrevocable passage of time by the arbitrary numbers on a clock while forming a unity of all experiences for the self. This unique construction, born out of insight, is explored throughout the exhibition mimicking a cyclical structure of time, “thoughts on thoughts” overlapping and lingering just like scent does.

For this exhibition, watercolour paintings made several decades earlier - fragmented images of a personal history – are brought together on the background cloth of needlework, some of the materials of which were presented as a gift or collected throughout the years. Such as the one, “Window of Time”, a cloth collage composed of gifted Turkish embroidery on a fabric bought in an Indian market was inspired by a watercolour made by Atakan in 1983 that she named “Window”.

Forming the backbone of the exhibition, “Searching for the Scent of Time” made in 2022 is a revisit to the time when Nancy was collecting antique table clocks from flea markets while being followed through the lens of filmmaker Dilek Aydın, for a documentary in the making about the artist. Throughout the show, those clocks appear in different mediums - on handkerchiefs, in a video, as a part of a sculpture - as symbolic and material objects, each opening an illusory window in time to the intangible place of memories.

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