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Secil Yaylali (TR)
Konditori
1-30/9 2017

The current Galleri CC space, more than 10 years ago, used to be a Turkish bakery. Now for one month the gallery rooms are turned back to their previous function. To be able to touch the memory of the space a journey was created in the space of the gallery. A journey that have an input of the artist’s daily life.

Turkish artist Seçil Yaylalı creates an interactive environment to critically reflect on the contradictory political situation in her country, using the multilayered Turkish sweets as a metaphor of the intricate present. Well-known images from Turkish media are presented in a stylized version like graphic icons. The same images are rolled up in several rolling pins as inked moulds, ready to be printed by the visitors. The kitchen of the bakery, besides producing the different Turkish sweets, will release another kind of everyday product: images from a sad-but-true aspect of Turkey’s contemporary life. Basically these are some of the images that linked to her day nightmares that effects her emotional life. They were the daily happenings that a single person needs to coup with them to be able to have a normal life in her own country. By the act of rolling and printing, participants will be engaged in the reproduction of images of people and places that lost their battle against a tragic history, keeping their memory alive in a simple act of resistance done in a former Turkish bakery.

Artist also made interviews with sweet makers in Malmö and investigated their stories. The stories were about their immigrating to Malmö that they had a stop over in Istanbul, turkey’s biggest city on the immigration way. These stories also made other layers of the whole project and expand the boundaries of the project till Malmö.

Secil Yaylalı is a visual artist with a background of Industrial Design and Arts. She realized participatory art projects with different social groups such as forced migrants in Diyarbakir and Ramallah, psychiatric patients in Novara, teenagers in Alexandria, Berlin, Barcelona, Istanbul, migrant workers in Beirut, street vendors in Turin. In each project she creates an environment that supports collaborative production according to the specific needs/wills of participants. Shared time and relations experience lead the group to reach a common aim as product. She exhibited her work in Alt_Chp Cross Cuts (Copenhagen 2016), Kunsthall C (Stockholm 2016), Apartman Projesi (Berlin 2015). Fondazione Pistoletto (Biella 2013), Palazzo Ducale (Genova 2011), NGBK (Berlin 2010). She is giving a workshop about “Censorship in artistic expression” in Marabouparken Stockholm with belit sag on 16th of September 2017. She is the co-founder of PASAJ artist initiative. She teaches basic design and contemporary art in Istanbul Technical University. She lives and works in Istanbul.