Sibel Kocakaya
In her painting and photography, her videos, performances and installations, Sibel Kocakaya (*1986 in Istanbul, lives and works in Bern) explores the relationship between the body and its surroundings in a variety of ways. She takes as her starting point environments that she has experienced herself, observations that she captures photographically, looking at the unusual or the ordinary with an unusual eye. She encounters her motifs on walks, hikes or journeys, starting from her places of residence, which have taken her from Istanbul to Paris, Lyon, Zurich and Bern. She usually combines several motifs in her works. The principle of superimposition and complexity, of subtle alienation, is fundamental to her work. As tangibly real as her pictures of the Swiss mountains appear, such as Untitled (‹Nufenen and Grimsel Pass›, 2020), Untitled (‹Rocky mountain from Ticino›, 2018) or Untitled (‹A view from Sustenpass›, 2020), they are painterly realizations and specially composed mountains in black and white.
Sibel Kocakaya is also interested in architecture: as a cultural asset and as a phenomenon in which we move every day, which constantly surrounds us and appeals to our senses. The structures and conditions, the habits and peculiarities of the built environment and its inhabitants are central to the artist’s work. In some cases, she combines painting with photography and collage and creates unreal, multidimensional pictorial spaces with opposing or flowing spatial alignments, as in the recent ‹Fluid structures›, 2023. Old meets new, antiquity meets modernity, for example in ‹Blue Column›, 2021, or ‹Aventicum›, 2021. Even the real space of ‹Interspace›, 2018, also becomes a mirage through the doubling of the windows, the floor and the ceiling. At times, the artist places herself in the space, in ambiguous situations and events, from observation, from her own experience. The titles ‹Threshold space›, 2021, ‹Sphere›, 2000 or Untitled (‹Solstice›), 2016, also bear witness to this. In the series ‹The Orbit of Memory›, 2020-2021, she deals with structures of dwelling. The architecture-like models made of clay and other «simple materials» refer to places of refuge that are as existential as they are intimate; as common as uncommon living spaces.
