Amos Eno Gallery is pleased to present Twine, a solo exhibition by Tulu Bayar. An opening reception will take place at the gallery’s Bushwick location at 56 Bogart St., on Friday, November 3, from 6 to 8 p.m. Concurrently, an exhibition by Dalit Gurevich will be on view in The Project Space.

A  limited number of exhibition catalogs signed by the artist will be available during the exhibition with a curatorial essay by Nina Chkareuli-Mdivani. This exhibition catalog is made possible by a grant from the Mellon Confounding Problems in the Public Humanities and Arts.

“In her new body of work for the exhibition Twine at Amos Eno Gallery, Turkish-American artist Tulu Bayar visually culls together an identity made up of two, eastern and western, paradigms embodying distinct halves of her life,” writes independent curator, writer, and researcher Nina Chkareuli-Mdivani in her curatorial essay, East and West Entwined: Tulu Bayar at Amos Eno Gallery. “As an immigrant, Bayar carries the sense of being the Other with her, not being fully at home either in the U.S. or in Turkey because she simultaneously exists within two historical and geographic continuums. … In Twine we encounter a more nuanced and abstract meditation on the nature of immigrant experience.”

The center of Bayar’s exhibition is a series of 18 Citra transfer prints on cotton paper, which she brushed with pastes made from soil, sand, water, and vegetation collected from various geographical regions of the U.S.A. and Turkey. The images are already exquisite in composition — often with a solitary female figure in the foreground, surveying a distant landscape — but are rendered even more haunting as a result of both the transfer process and the earth-paste application. Colors are pushed and pulled, edges are softened, and textures are enhanced. The resulting prints look as if they were discovered in a long-forgotten trunk, transporting us to a time and place we aren’t sure ever existed.​

Bayar’s photo transfer technique symbolizes the imprint of memory on the self. “The images themselves become a collage of moments that have shaped my path,” she says. “I maintain a multidisciplinary practice that weaves through to produce reflections of immigrant experience.”

Like many immigrants in the States and elsewhere, Bayar negotiates her identity on the borderline of two languages and cultures. Her heightened sensitivity to flux and transition opens a gate for a dialectic worldview where she constantly relearns to exist. “Bayar creates urban cityscapes devoid of crowds, but with hints and outlines of a mysterious feminine figure. By providing us with a reference point of a human body, Bayar not only gives us a scale of her fantastic synthesized structures, but also a protagonist, a human being who is unlikely to inhabit these architectural marvels, yet, is presiding over them,” writes Chkareuli-Mdivani. “The figure is like a hopeful immigrant herself trying to subvert the power of the golden city in the sky, yet trying to hold onto the reality available to her.”

Bayar’s site-specific installations at Amos Eno Gallery reference and enhance the imagery in her series of prints. A collection of white trays are scattered flat across the wall, with assortments of Turkish coffee and tea cups with saucers as well as mugs with varying heights jutting out from their surfaces. These drinking vessels mimic the architectural forms on the Citra transfers, but their perpendicular orientation makes the resulting “floating cities” rather uncomfortable dwellings for anyone approaching from a different perspective — an apt commentary on the immigrant experience.

Meanwhile, a trio of giant scrolls cascades vertically down another wall. Hung at staggered heights and curling onto the floor in various sculptural piles, they reveal information only on the part that is not rolled. Both ends are rolled up, referencing the hidden past and future, waiting for an unfold. “I assemble disparate elements, ranging from salvaged images, photographs, photographic films, old drawings, and maps to repurposed textiles and cultural belongings, and imbue them with new life,” Bayar says. “This process of amalgamation serves as a metaphor for the mosaic of human existence — fragments coming together to form a coherent whole.”​

The circular shapes of the scrolls and their circular motifs reference the white trays and the Citra transfer prints, all borrowing from Italo Calvino’s “continuous cities.”  Calvino suggests that there is actually one continuous city that does not begin or end. To that end, exposing the less-obvious differences in the things hiding in plain sight in each cityscape or landscape in that continuity becomes a performative act in Bayar’s Twine exhibition: Material becomes the mirror and she gives materials human traits. The comprehensive effect of Bayar’s prints, trays, and scrolls altogether then transform the gallery into a continuous city.

About Tulu Bayar 

Bayar has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions at museums and galleries in the US as well as in Germany, Denmark, UK, Ireland, France, Colombia, Turkey and China.  Her work is part of public collections including Belfast Exposed Photography, Samuel Dorsky Museum, Elgiz Museum of Contemporary Art (Istanbul), and the Textile Museum at George Washington University. Her exhibitions have been covered by international media including NPR, The Irish Times, Afterimage, Photography Quarterly, TRT (National Public Broadcaster of Turkey) and the Bushwick Daily.

 A Fulbright Scholar, she has also received funding from Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, Ténot Foundation, artist-in residency grants from Camac Centre d’Art in France and the Center for Photography at Woodstock funded by the Andy Warhol Foundation as well as William Sackett Fellowship through Virginia Center for Creative Arts.

Bayar received her BA degree in Communications and Journalism from Ankara University and her MFA in Electronic Arts from University of Cincinnati. She is currently Professor of Art and Chair at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania, where she co-founded the Ekard Artist Residency.

For more information, please contact Gallery Director Ellen Sturm Niz at amosenogallery@gmail.com.