FLOATING IMAGES / solo exhibition  /  Sanatorium Gallery, Istanbul /  10 June > 6 August 2022

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“Wet Memories of the Immediate Future”*
Asli Seven

“Floating Images” seems to take place in a lapse of memory, in the scintilla of space and time separating one mechanically reproduced image copy from another, an infra-distance barely enough for an accident to occur, for a glitch to slide in and to signal a deviation from the program, which serves as a metaphor for memory: every remembering is a forgetting.
Like the before / after instant of the blink of an eye, or the distance separating binocular vision into two varied images of the same, the gallery space and the exhi-bition occur in the movement between two seemingly repetitive images: “Soft Amnesia” displayed on the window front facing the outside, and “Soft Amnesia” installed on the back wall dominating the rectangu-lar gallery space. Now, before we continue, you might want to try to remember what you saw on the win-dow front before you were inside the space. You might also want to go back outside to look at what you saw before entering the gallery, while trying – and failing - to remember precisely what separates the two. “Floating Images” is an exhibition that requires movement as an exercise of seeing, forgetting and remem-bering all at once, an exercise to learn to get comfortable in the face of doubt and uncertainty.
“Soft Amnesia” carries simultaneously multiple projections and effects of erasure, fragmentation and jux-taposition. The surface image – a print on paper – oscillates between a myriad of potential and virtual meanings: it could be the eroding trace of a bygone day at the beach, a body floating on the surface of water, in process of losing its precision as an indexical trace or an imprint, and gaining in turn a quality of imagination and dream. It could also be a body propelled by an engine, like a spacecraft, leaving a wake of clouds behind it as it pierces through the atmosphere. It could be a missile wayfaring through the sky on a predetermined trajectory to capture a target, or a drone on a reconnaissance mission, projected towards regions of the universe yet unknown; or even, the microscopic visualization of a biochemical agent in-serted into the cellular structure of an organism in a lab experiment. It could be an accidental image, and the image of an accident at the same time, reminiscent of those pixelated images of human bodies falling through heights, captured by unintentionally by an amateur camera or a surveillance machine. As such, it serves as a metaphor for that precise historic moment when image-making devices escape human intention and start operating as parts of an inter-objective network - whereby which machines communi-cate with machines to remember in our place, to coordinate physical movement through geolocalization systems or to manage logistic circuits for objects and information to move in the world.

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> To read the full text of Asli Seven, go to TEXTS

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