Banu Cennetoğlu

SculptureCenter is pleased to announce Banu Cennetoğlu, the artist’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States, and In Practice: Other Objects, an exhibition presented through SculptureCenter’s open call commissioning program for emerging artists.

Banu Cennetoğlu In her wide ranging cross-disciplinary practice, Banu Cennetoğlu uses objects, images, texts, and printed matter to continuously scrutinize, contemplate, and question the position of the artist/individual vis-à-vis and within the complex geopolitical conditions of our time.

Cennetoğlu’s exhibition at SculptureCenter—her first in a U.S. institution—includes a moving image work that presents the totality of the artist’s visual archive from June 10, 2006 to March 21, 2018. The film comprises 128 hours and 22 minutes of still images and videos sourced from various devices in an unedited stream of content. Cennetoğlu refers to the work as an “introspective” that brings together scattered, fleeting moments of a life lived, from the birth of her daughter to moments of political upheaval and protest; documentation of her artistic practice; to banal footage of everyday life. The exhibition also gathers for the first time the complete 142 volumes of Cennetoğlu’s newspaper projects to date, for which the artist collects and binds a compilation of all newspapers published in a country on a single day. By tying together personal and public archives, Cennetoğlu’s work not only reinforces the maxim that the personal is political, but insists that it is also and inevitably the other way around.

Publication support for Banu Cennetoğlu is provided by SAHA, saha.org.tr. Additional in-kind exhibition support is provided by Genelec. Banu Cennetoğlu is curated by Sohrab Mohebbi, Curator, with Kyle Dancewicz, Director of Exhibitions and Programs. The exhibition is accompanied by a color publication with a joint contribution by Sohrab Mohebbi and Thomas Keenan, Director of the Human Rights Project at Bard College.