“Naturmort; Meta Data”

Mixed media / İstanbul, 2008

A special selection of 1.200 objects, prepared by the artist as the result of a six month shopping spree at the Istanbul-Dolapdere flea market, makes up ‘Naturmort: Meta Data.’ Approaching the meta-fetish concept that determines the present industry’s icons over a continuous shopping experience, the artist has created at the end of this half-year-long gathering process a free collection born of his own particularity.

The artist, setting off from the premises of the first surrealists who reinvented rubbish heaps as temples of pioneering taste and elevated flea market visitations to aesthetic pilgrimages, explores ways of questioning the meta-fetish concept and the city’s minor memory during this lengthy shopping experience. The selection, consisting of the incidental assembly of 1.200 objects that once struck up fetishistic desire and are now stripped of their function, constructs a corpus full of impossibities regarding the memory accumulation of modern history. The installation, where the concept of meta-fetish is produced over the objects’ own memory and the basis of one space – the market – in which they become collective, is presented with 24-week market lists where each object has been recorded.