Erkan Özdilek from the Faculty of Fine Arts will attend the program in the Netherlands

AURA/ CONTEMPORARY TURKISH ART

We’re living in an age in which people question themselves more than any other periods in the past and make a great effort to enrich their living spaces. The information society has not yet achieved inter-communal reconciliation despite all kinds of developments today. Societies creating themselves in the world with their original and deep cultural histories have been stuck in an endless power struggle and have been kept away from living the richness of their own culture. There is almost only one area left piercing such a pessimistic atmosphere like a sunrise and creating new perspectives and hopes: Art and Culture. These two fields, carrying a humanist manifesto as a symbol of peace and friendship today, have given themselves more mission nowadays than in the past. The global information network and its output, the global eye, made all the cultural seeds of the world visible. Everything purified belonging to the inner world of man has become the material of today's art. Today, contemporary art is nourished by this rich material brought by all civilizations to the present day. In everything that belongs to someone, there is always something that belongs to everyone in a sense. When a local material meets the connectors offered by other geographies, it turns into a value that belongs to “us”. Art now represents the source of the potions that make life meaningful.

Opened at the Pulchri Art Center in Den Haag and consisting of the works of 18 contemporary Turkish artists, the “Aura/Contemporary Turkish Art” Exhibition is a contemporary representation of this intercultural interaction. This exhibition undertakes the mission of accelerating Turkish-Dutch cultural relations, whose history dates back to the 17th century, and is a gift to all humanist sentiments who look at the world through the 'Aura' of which they created their art within, yearn for peace in the world, and want to be a brother society by removing the forced borders between societies.

Ahmet Ozel
Curator

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