One of the early and most important representatives of Turkish contemporary art, Füsun Onur explores the relations between form, space, and time in her works which revolve around concepts and themes such as transience, memory, subconscious, and the visible vs the invisible. In the 1960s and 70s, the artist focused on these explorations and experimentations, but the materials she used became more varied and expanded to include daily, narrative and autobiographical elements. As of the mid-1970s, Onur gravitated more and more away from traditional materials and towards ready-made objects and common domestic items. The artist has produced installations, interventions and sculptures, both indoors and outdoors, and as of the 1980s, started to question the relations between her production and the exhibition space, inviting the physical emptiness of these places into her works.
Füsun Onur’s practice also highlights the idea of music, and often includes contrasts of light/shadow, black/white, and full/empty in her works. Her work entitled "Whisper" is an installation where a form reminiscent of a low stool with crossed legs forms its own rhythm and yields to silence, gradually transforming itself and decreasing in size like the seven notes of a musical scale.
You are all set!
Your first Culture Weekly will arrive this week.