Rahşan Düren’in “Siyah-Soyut”ları

Ali Artun Ocak 2025

“Siyah” ve “soyut” deyince şüphesiz akla ilkin Maleviç’in 1915 yılında sergilediği Siyah Kare gelir: Yaklaşık 80x80 cm boyutlarında herkesin boyayabileceği bir tuval. Soyut sanatın ikonu olan bu eser bir estetik manifestodur. Maleviç’e göre Siyah Kare “sanatın sıfır noktasıdır.” Sanatın o zamana kadarki bütün tarihinin silinmesidir. Formların ve sayıların gayet sembolik ve sır dolu olduğu antik geometri ve aritmetikten hareket eder. Onların büyüsü sayesinde kozmik bir armoni içindeki yeni bir dünyayı uyandırır.

Rahşan Düren’in “siyah-soyut”ları Siyah Kare’nin tam karşıtıdır. Armonik değildir kaotiktir, ütopik değil distopiktir, optimist değil nihilisttir. Düren, Maleviç gibi “duygulardan arınmış, saf, ideal” formlar peşinde değildir. Onun soyutları aksine, çarpıktır, bitmemiştir, şekilsizdir ve son derecede duygusaldır. Öfke, nefret, lanet, şiddet içerir. Karanlıktır. Bu karanlık, sanatçının karanlığıdır; onun iç dünyasının karanlığıdır. Hem dehşet uyandırırlar, hem de huşû. İzleyiciyi ezerler. Bir taraftan da siyahın yüceliğine kapılırsınız. Dehşetin güzelliğini hissedersiniz.

Düren’in soyutları bir takım tasarımlardan, tasavvurlardan kaynaklanmaz; eylem sanatıdır. André Breton’un terimiyle “psişik otomatizm” eseridir. Anında icra edilirler. Herşey, tuvalin başındaki sanatçı kadar hızla hareket eder. Öyle ki, siyah lekeler tuvallerinden taşarlar ve diğer tuvallerdeki imgelerle bağlanırlar. Bütün sergi tek bir eser haline gelir. Dehşetengiz bir atmosfere dönüşür.

Siyah-Soyutlar, akla, rasyonalizme , realizme, sembolizme meydan okurlar. Evet... Maleviç’in Siyah Kare’si de tasvire, temsile, taklide (mimesis estetiğine) karşıdır. Ama antik matematiğin mistisizmine, “kare” formunun ilahî sembolizmine kapılmıştır. El Lissitzki’nin sözleriyle Siyah Kare, “hiç yaşanmamış yeni bir dünyanın amblemidir”. Düren’in eserinin bir referansı yoktur. Kendi ruhsallığına, asabiyetine (temperament) çağırır izleyiciyi. Ne kadar anlamsızsa ifadesi o kadar güçlüdür, ne kadar soyutsa o kadar hayalîdir, ne kadar renksiz ve siyahsa o kadar dipsiz ve

ışıksızdır. Zihnimizi ve ruhumuzu fena halde kışkırtır. Sonsuz birer düşünseme (reflexion-derinlere dalma) ve hissetme kaynaklarıdır.

“Verwegenheit”: A Journey into an “Archaeology of the Mind” at Tarhan Han

İpek Yeğinsü

Rahşan Düren reveals her multidimensional and deep personality to those able to look beyond the visible. Her artistic practice is driven by an endless sense of curiosity more powerful than her anxieties, directed both towards herself and the world. Perhaps also due to her life story extending from country to country and making her feel like partly “estranged” everywhere, she never refrains from facing the unknown. Every time she presents the creative output of her research, development and thought processes spanning over many years, she engages in new experiments some of which can be considered “risky”. Yet she expresses no interest in joining certain synthetic networks of belongingness. Hence, her title of choice for her seventh solo exhibition “Verwegenheit”, meaning “fearlessness, boldness, daring” in German, is far from coincidental. And although it mostly consists of paintings, the exhibition deserves being addressed as a “site-specific installation”.

According to Düren, the biggest universal dilemma of our age is the extent of the difficulty in establishing authentic relationships despite the widely available communication possibilities, which is due to the feeling of alienation individuals develop towards themselves and others. Often experienced at a social scale through sexual, ethnic and cultural identities, the latter still originates from the denial processes dominating the individuals’ relationships to themselves and their surroundings. This is why she critiques her society’s zeitgeist by exploring the trigger points of the human psyche that she knows very well thanks to her psychiatric professional identity marked by a rich background in philosophy. She sneaks into the viewers’ unconscious, hurting or denuding them at times, and takes them by surprise in these spaces with an “identity” and “personality” with no escape from facing their selves, pasts, desires and fears. This is also why she avoids presenting her art in white cube environments reshaped with every exhibition they host. This approach culminates in E-Motions (2015), her kinetic installation at Haydarpaşa, where she explores the relationship between emotion and movement departing from the train station’s references. She pursues the same creative path at Tarhan Han, the venue she has chosen for “Verwegenheit”, based on the space’s deserted state and lost memory.

For Düren, as one of Beyoğlu’s historical venues known for its magnificent Art Deco façade, Tarhan Han lost its “soul” to a great extent due to the restoration it underwent following a long period of abandonment. Surrounded by Pera’s familiar yet beaten landscape fragments, the building is reminiscent of a time traveler stuck in purgatory. Only some disconnected and vague traces survive from the interior’s architectural character. Düren turns this unsettling contrast between the building’s external appearance and interior spaces into a metaphor of the gap between the individual’s image in the outside world and their hidden authentic self. Taking the latter as a departure point, she scatters across the space her abstract and semi-abstract 2D and 3D compositions which cyclically merge into and separate from the architecture, based on deliberate cinematographic choices considering time and motion. She offers the viewers a transitive space where they can look at themselves from the inside and out, and fully surrender to the “flow”. This gives way to a performative installation beyond a mere collection of paintings that can only become complete with the viewer’s active participation.

With “Verwegenheit”, Düren departs from the memory fragments offered by Tarhan Han and its immediate surroundings to unravel a process of the “archaeology of the mind”, compelling the viewers to confront themselves and question the networks of belongingness they base their existence upon. In this plane, the boundaries between the individual and the social dissolve; according to the artist for whom existence and its systems of knowledge demand a holistic approach, those boundaries have never existed to begin with. For her, creative action is the leading condition of survival, owning one’s subjectivity and liberation. Despite all the difficulties brought about by the current age, as long as creativity exists, hope will never cease to exist.