En Masse: Books Orchestrated

April 21 – July 1, 2017

Books, foremost agents of intellectual and visual stimuli, pose as objects of desire and forms of aesthetic due to their psychical precision that stems from their geometric formations and mysterious potential. When loosely arranged together through a conceptual or aesthetic vision–whether piled or adjoined– books adopt further narratives distinct in their structure, yet still original in their intellectual content. En Masse: Books Orchestrated, organized by Osman Can Yerebakan, contemplates various possibilities on intellectual thinking and collective culture, bringing together various artists that utilize book arrangement in their practice, while suggesting an alternative perspective on analyzing and interpreting materials beyond their physicality and content.

Complex and profound in their pristine forms, books endure as agents of both subjective specification and individualistic expression. Embedded with certain connotations, each book transfers an aura via its outer case. Authors, titles or artwork covering their layers convey the content of a book, while dictating assumptions on its subject matter. The exhibition aims to investigate cultural, historical, and emotional attributions on books as phenomenons while analyzing the dialogue between every individual edition with one another and their audience.

The artists include Louis Zoellar Bickett, Jordan Buschur, Emilio Chapela, Özgür Demirci, Donald Daedalus, Leor Grady, Katarina Jerinic, Nina Katchadourian, j.c. lenochan, Liz Linden, Michael Mandiberg, Phil Shaw, Ward Shelley & Douglas Paulson, Yinka Shonibare MBE, and Julia Weist.