Legal Tender

From September 5th until October 27th, 2007, Kasa Galeri presents the exhibition Legal Tender organised by Sencer Vardarman parallel with the 10th International Istanbul Biennial

With this group exhibition the Berlin-based artist focuses on the former function of the location as a bank and teams up with Rey Akdogan, Mario Asef, Fulya Çetin and Tobias Laukemper to trace the many meanings of the term Legal Tender. Legal Tender is (per definition) payment, that by law, cannot be refused in settlement of a debt denominated in the same currency. Legal Tender is a status, which may be conferred on certain examples of money, which may depend on circumstances including the amount of money. The term Legal Tender does not refer to money itself.Legal Tender is a concept that is frequently misunderstood, which is often a result of differing legal definitions in different jurisdictions.

The artists take the task and display their projects allotted in the three main spaces of the Gallery:

Rey Akdogan (*1974, lives and works in Berlin and New York) adds a humorous notion to the term and space, by staging an accessible microcosm, a conglomerate of typical materials used to outfit the foyer of a bank, which functions as a space of representation. While creating a small sized model, she uses hyperbolism to visualise tacky and over the top materials, forms, plants and colours used to present status, which intends to create secureness an wealth in the guests eye. She reforms the now invisible past of the space.

Mario Asef (*1971 Córdoba, Argentina, lives and works in Berlin) work titled The Mystery and the Wonder almost follows the lead of visualising a long lost space. By presenting the Zenon paradox of the ancient hero Achilles and the turtle, Asef renarrates the disappearance of the city of Byzantium. The paradox describes a race between the two, which end in the infinity of algebraic analysis. This textual work is confronted with the legend of the history of the palace Dolmabahce - a building formed from the immaterial, whose factoring was based on the Sultans order to print more money, because the financial capacity of the city has already been exhausted.

Fulya Çetin (*1970 Istanbul, lives and works in XX) approaches the subject Legal Tender on a very intimate level through portraits. As the term does not only refer to money itself, Çetin focuses on very personal and everyday life in Turkish culture and ways of handling payments. In Turkey it still can be seen that the parents chose their daughters husband, which leads to diverse problems in the lives of the youngsters. Baslik parasi verbalises the habitués of the grooms’ parents to pay for the bride.

Tobias Laukemper (*1970 Düsseldorf, lives and works in Rotterdam and Berlin) work titled „The Script“, which duplicates extracts of social reality is staged in the vault of the bank, which builds an analogy of dominance with the power symbol of money. The work, realized as a b/w print, which illustrates the digital origin of the image plays and focuses on the question of authorship. Questioning on how a product is displayed and strategically approached by its author, Laukemper traces the ways to present a sort of universal formula.

Sencer Vardarman (*1970 Istanbul, lives and works in Istanbul and Berlin) highlights the provenance and identity of currencies in his textual work. By tracing the etymological origins of the medium of exchange, Vardarman develops a genealogical tree, which visualises the collectivism of the global culture and questions the non-economical functions of money. Vardarman works with the reorganisation of information and its visual expression as a method and realises conceptual works that are using certain aesthetical codes.

Legal Tender
Ort: Kasa Galeri, Istanbul

mit Rey Akdogan, Mario Asef, Fulya Cetin, Tobias Laukemper, Sencer Vardarman