Beginning, memories and the end

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Luz Blanco, who opened her first solo exhibition in Istanbul two years ago, presents her new works in the exhibition "Eden – The End" at Sanatorium until June 14. The exhibition brings together drawings linked to the artist's memory and installations referencing religious narratives.

By Tugba Esen

Luz Blanco's exhibition "Eden – The End", composed of drawings and installations, spreads across two floors of Sanatorium. Although the works are shaped around a common theme, the two levels develop distinct approaches. On the ground floor, drawings directly linked to memory recall the artist's previous exhibition, while the lower floor houses installations inspired by religious narratives, which also gave the exhibition its name. Images selected from films and photographs — felt by the artist as her own memories or fragments of her personal recollections — merge through Luz Blanco's aesthetic approach to create a collective memory. In her drawings, where she sometimes reconstructs the same scene from different angles and framings, the artist draws attention to the gaps in memory and its easy manipulation. In her drawings evoking photographic collages composed of superimposed images, she references the multi-layered nature of memory. These unfinished moments, sometimes losing their clarity and drifting from their context, evoke subconscious scenes that lose their meaning.

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A constructed memory

Blanco's drawings and installations, exploring the relationship between "the end" and "the garden of Eden" — in other words, the beginning — occupy the lower level of the gallery. Referencing the space between the end of life and paradise through representations of clouds, the artist brings excerpts from Augustine's "Confessions" into the exhibition space as both drawings and video installations. Augustine's sentences, framed in neon brackets, appearing and disappearing, fading or coming forward, make reference to the selectivity of memory, while simultaneously forming a meaningless whole from these sentence fragments. Two years ago, under the title "I don't remember", Luz Blanco was already exploring at Sanatorium the relationship between remembering and forgetting. This approach resurfaces in most of the works in "Eden – The End". Perhaps some involuntarily recorded moments actually become part of our memory just as much as our most personal recollections. The images processed by the artist ultimately form a new memory whose building blocks are shared memories.

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A pool of collective memory

In Luz Blanco's works, the boundaries between collective memory and individual memory become blurred.

A film scene or a photograph taken by someone else at any point in history can become part of the artist's personal memories. The artist allows the intersection of different paths and stories. She shows that it is possible to establish a personal relationship with an image recorded through someone else's testimony.

On one hand, she emphasizes the shared nature of memory; on the other, she undertakes to create a collective memory pool herself. Luz Blanco, who constructs her drawings from documentary and film images she manipulates, adopts a more experimental and investigative approach in her installations created with different materials and methods. The artist's second solo exhibition in Istanbul, "Eden – The End", open from May 15 to June 14, can be described as a serene exhibition that reveals her own priorities.

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