Before Falling Asleep

The solo exhibition of Serkan Yüksel, Before Falling Asleep, combines the critique of today’s political language with a scrupulous technique. The artist processes his open political attitude on masculine documentations that are used on ready-made objects. Between layers of unraveled memory he rips out the heroes of the future as well as murderers, hunters and victims. Before Falling Asleep shows us that the stories told can become the awakening of sharp utopias. To remember is to save illegitimate lives and to wake up to new stories.
Serkan Yüksel, created the most important part of his work and his conceptual atmosphere of Before Falling Asleep during the Gezi days. Gezi showed Yüksel how collective memory clashed with official history and how the result was a utopia. Where the past, the present and the future meet, Yüksel has created the idea that lies not in the anachronistic fictional activity of nostalgia, but in a more revolutionary way of remembrance.
Serkan Yüksel, along with his power as a sculptor he whittles and with the cautiousness of a surgeon cuts newspapers, bosses; those who measure, breed and put maps into boxes. Yüksel looks for something in the thickness of a paper that holds the record of barbarism. Like a tumor, he looks for something that has been stuck and still tingles. A moment that has been carved into our memory, a sentence, a symbol, a shadow, a sound…
Its when Yüksel finds that in his memory that it falls like one large rock, layers of time reach the openness of a fan.
The exhibition of Before Falling Asleep, promises a thrilling experience for those who on 12th of September* are part of the young generation, but even more for those who have decided to not forget nor wipe from their memory. The exhibition will be on display at C.A.M Gallery from the 8 – 31 of October.

*12 September 1980, a coup d’état was staged in Turkey.