"ONE" by Sümer Sayın, Sabrina Amrani Art Gallery, Madrid

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 Parade, Video

Inflation, Woven money bills

 The world is round and The Country of Transition, Acrylic on canvas

 I Want the World to Stop, Sculpture

 2,5 D, Woven world maps

 The Stars, Machine embroidery on fabric

 Intervals, Ink on paper

The Country of Transition, Acrylic on canvas

‘ONE’, by Sümer Sayın at Sabrina Amrani Art Gallery

The gallery welcomes 2013 with a show by an emergent Turkish artist.

The title of the exhibition, 'ONE' refers to unity, as well as loneliness. Unity in the sense of how we want to see the world today and loneliness as how we end up seeing it in reality.

Sümer Sayın deconstructs elements of individual entities. Her work focuses on the moments when the concepts of indeterminacy, probability, relativity and hope intersect, dealing with mental probabilities created from the indefinite systems, which are in the process of construction and can give access to new perceptions. Working with maps, flags, bills, sculpture, video and other media, Sayın proposes reformulated versions of representations of human knowledge.

This is the case of the piece that opens the exhibition: Parade, a video in which the 60 largest economies in the world according to the IMF, march one after the other. The countries appear in a globe in alphabetical order, one by one, like actors in a military parade. The pieces of land, isolated from their context and completely surrounded by a single ocean, come and go. By this decontextualization, hidden relationships and contrasts between different types of power become more visible. 

The world and its representation also appears on the three acrylic paintings that comprises the series Maps of Transition. In The World is Round and in The World of Transition Sayın builds her own utopia bringing together continents and countries while maintaining their own identities. Probabilities that Sayin manipulates, placing them together in successive moments or layers, can be delusional at times, while at other times they are hopeful, and thus create dilemmas. In 'The Country of Transition', the map of Turkey is re-formulated as duplicated horizontal lines, rotating angles borders.

The exhibition continues with the sculpture I want the world to stop, a piece that is an imaginary illustration of the collision between an unknown object that looks like a meteorite and the planet Earth. The meteorite is larger than the Earth, practicing in the collision as an outside force that could result poetically in the stop of its movement and time instead of an explosion, and considering the balance as a kind of equation that could be reformulated in different circumstances, as opposed to a constant location.

Sümer Sayın explores the fragility of the process of re-construction in 2,5 D and Inflation. In the first one Sayın weaves by hand a new map of the world from two identical maps on paper and in the process adds a new layer to the two dimensions of the paper through the bending of it, creating movements and making borders appear blurry or displaced. In Inflation, two identical bills of 5 Turkish Liras undergo the same process, but in this case referring to globalization of the world and re-building a single bill that artificially and ironically doubles its value.

With the drawings on graph paper Intervals, the world map is re-formulated by an analogous method where new connections and disruptions between borders is built, while in The Country of Transition, the map of Turkey is re-formulated as duplicated horizontal lines, rotating angles borders. The space between the lines corresponds to land. The restructuring of the borders, thus creates exits to the left and right of the image.

The exhibition is completed with Sayin’s latest piece, The Stars, where the artist, deconstructing the flags of all countries and arranging them in alphabetical order, creates a large flag only consisting of white stars on a black background. The union of the flags relocated recreates an abstracted reflection of national borders that fade into the darkness to leave us a starry night scene of an unnatural appearance, which refers to the dream of one world under the sky.