Mountains Have No Owners

Burcu Perçin’s 9th solo exhibition “Mountains Have No Owners” will be on display at art ON Istanbul between April 15 – May 24 2014. Having opened her first solo exhibition in İstanbul titled “Mural Domination” in 2012, she prefers to use outdoor and interior spaces so as to express her subjects.

Putting together the characteristic artistic attitude and all the approaches the painting art has witnessed throughout the history, Perçin offers an innovative stance and viewpoint to painting. Known with her influential expression and sensitivity to preserve the balance between form, colour, aesthetic and subject, the artist appears before the visitors with her new solo exhibition “Mountains Have No Owners”.

In her works that are exhibited under the title of “Mountains Have No Owners”, Burcu Perçin directs her attention to the nature and the its consumption by the capital. The painterly relationship she builds up with the abandoned and industrial places is visible in her works in which she uses the forms to visualise the effects of globalization on nature, people and places. Perçin’s tendency to reveal the globalized capital markets’ use and consumption of public domains finds voice in her paintings that depict the destruction on mountains. The common expression used by mountaineers “Mountains Have No Owners” becomes the title of Perçin’s solo exhibition.

Outer spaces and landscapes that we witnessed primarily in her previous works become the main subject in this series. Perçin’s works reflect her concern on the fact that mountains have been digged up and excavated to be turned into mines and quarries in recent years in Turkey as well as the poor working conditions of the workers on construction sites and the obliteration of mountains by foreign-partnered capital powers without regarding the fact that mountains are public domains. Besides her ideological approach it is also possible to see the artistic relation Perçin established with images in this series.
The artist tells of her new exhibition “Mountains Have No Owners” in following words: “In this series, I’m dealing with the issue of mountains being turned into a tool to get unearned income at capital’s command. Mountains are habitats and life source for all living creatures but this reality has been ignored. I’m using excavated mountains; mines and quarries as main images in this exhibition where I try to express my own impressions and feelings about the geographical changes caused by human interferences and reflect them on my works in my own painterly style. Witnessing these irremediable and insoluble interferences towards nature, during my preparation process for the exhibition, I have always thought of nature’s response to these intrusions… Along with the ideological aspect of the subject, the visual richness of the landscape is remarkable… All these images are relevant to the subject I’m dealing with; these forms, colours and textures fulfil my expectations. The visuality this subject brings adds geometric and sculptural forms to my works and leads me look for further formal pursuit.”

The works in “Mountains Have No Owners”, on which we obtained clues from Perçin’s previous artworks, depict how Perçin chooses outer spaces as her subject and how texture and colour become prominent. Perçin has carried out a long-running project for the works in her new series. The artist who took a great deal of photographs in different periods and places and made a profound research for her exhibition also includes oil paintings that she applied on the photographs. Burcu Perçin’s solo exhibition “Mountains Have No Owners” may be visited at art ON Istanbul between April 15th and May 24th 2014.

Osman Erden, 2014