Cut Glass

Deniz Gül’s artistic practice, which incorporates various materials ranging from wood, metal, and glass to milk, oil and acid, also encompasses the mediums of poetry and fiction. She often draws inspiration from the imagery, characters and themes present in her own writings. The artist’s primary interest lies in the ways words and narratives are translated into objects, reclaim their body, and establish physical and imaginary bonds with space. For her solo exhibition "5 Person Bufet" curated by Emre Baykal at Arter in 2011, and later acquired for the Arter Collection, Deniz Gül once again revisited one of her own texts from 2009 around the themes of borders, geography, interior-exterior, domestic life, forms of power, language, expression and narrative. Spanning various artistic mediums, "5 Person Bufet" was first conceived as a theatrical poetry in three acts that Gül began writing in 2009, underwent transformation into a spatial installation and a book for the exhibition at Arter two years later, and eventually evolved into a sound performance based on the original text, presented in 2015 at the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago.

In her solo exhibition "5 Person Bufet" at Arter, Deniz Gül created a space where the claustrophobia of introvert, small spaces and the agoraphobia of getting out, of overflowing oneself coexisted. The installation comprised five pieces of furniture embodying the five characters from the text authored by the artist, along with geometrically decorated cut-glass panels affixed to the windows of the exhibition space. The concluding piece of the exhibition was a yellow frosted glass door that was not possible to enter. Despite being illuminated by the flickering images of a television screen behind it, "Frosted Glass" prevented viewers from seeing what was going on inside the room. A spatially adapted version of the same work was also included in the collection-based group exhibition "What Time Is It?" (2019) which was realised as part of the inauguration programme of Arter’s new building in Dolapdere. In 2023 another piece from "5 Person Bufet", "Cut Glass", has been brought back to life as part of the exhibition "In Its Own Shadow", carrying with it the faint memory of the space it once inhabited.

The motifs on "Cut Glass" seem to belong neither to the place where they were first exhibited nor to their current surroundings. They appear as if they have migrated to the gallery from a vitrine where glassware, silver trays and crystal goblets are displayed as a symbol of both the power of home and a breach of its privacy. In her solo exhibition "5 Person Bufet", Gül relocated these motifs from the ‘interior’, where they naturally belonged, to an ‘exterior’ setting, placing them on the windows, the intermediary space between the private and the public. This time, with a reverse gesture, she moves them from the ‘exterior’ back to the ‘interior’, and positions them on a blank wall. The cut-glass pieces, which had taken on the very form of the windows they once adorned, have now found a new home – a wall where they stand alone in the company of their own shadows.