Exhibitions

Shadow Memory/Tem Art Gallery

IN THE PAINTINGS OF DEVABİL KARA

LAYERS OF MEMORY, SHADOW MEMORIES

Prof. Dr. Kıymet Giray

Memory, as a concept, is actually the primary meaning of the existence of a human being who lives only in the “moment.” It is an accumulation that defines life and pertains to life. It consists of teachings and daily programs, improvised formations, systems, and experimentalism. In a sense, it is a pattern of knowledge explained through theories and scattered current events.

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2016

The layers of memory that we accumulate, or assume we accumulate, define the formation of our lives. In this context, the pattern of moments—what is learned, what is known, and experimental acquisitions—exhibits the individual history of our lives. We store our perceptions—which we enrich with the time lived in a designated space (or time that evokes the illusion of lived experience), social, spiritual, psychological, and environmental factors, and most importantly, the data of our imagination, worldview, and knowledge levels—within the layers of our memory.

Simply put, at the very moment we begin to explain ourselves, we come face to face with our memory. We explain our lives by navigating through the moments accumulated within the intervals of memory, whose boundaries and selections we determine ourselves. At this stage, the moments we express or think about become crystallized as they are remembered repeatedly, transforming into the primary sections of patterns. These new layers of memory, formed between telling and listening, become the filling of gaps; a cooperation of perceived reality and felt experience, selection through perception, and the realities of what is and what is known. As we progress by repeating the narration of moments/memories of life, more careful selections begin to be made from among the patterns that start to disperse.

In this context, different time processes, different spaces, and different perceptions—as much as the common moments existing between the narrator and the listeners—analyze different layers of memory resolved through mutual dialogues. The question “According to what?” sequences the moments that explain different memory intervals. Multiplying layers turn into emerging processes and indicators that explain these processes. Life begins to unravel by following the moments that serve as clues. Layers of memory fill the breaking point of emerging from nothingness to become Being. This pattern, standing as intricate spirals, is actually the simple state of the mystery-filled phenomenon called memory.

For some time, I have been wandering within the memory pattern of Umberto Eco’s novel The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. One day you open your eyes in a hospital. All moments have been erased; your memory is lost. Who are you? You know nothing about your family, your past, or even yourself.

However, all the information taught to you, poems, songs, and details related to your profession remain in your memory.

The fog that encompasses the past of both the author and his protagonist also shrouds the memory. It hides, conceals, protects, and rescues. It disperses very slowly. The layers of memory begin to part. First, the things you learned come to mind. Starting from taught information, you remember the moments you lived very slowly; you progress heavily within your own life. In your own real world, you remember the moments you accumulated as if reliving them. Inevitably, you return to the life you define as real by tracing the marks of memories. In the fictional world, it consists of the memories of your own world.
The paints caught on Devabil Kara’s brush also wander between layers of memory that overlap with this very meaning. In a fictional design, she rescues the moments hidden, concealed, and protected within. The pictorial construction dominant in Devabil’s works, in line with the aesthetic values of the century, slowly begins to leave its own molds to a new understanding of form/style.

She explains the layers of memory as contemporary phenomena within their own mysteries, transforming them into symbolic depictions reaching fine details through abstract expressions based on the expansion of time and space.

Devabil’s abstract expressionist compositions bring to her canvases the auras reflecting the essences of memories that form the layers of lived moments. This aura makes references to the meaning that developed in the late 20th century when the concepts of time-memory became dominant in abstract expressionism. Like the artists who adopted the Abstract Expressionism movement, Kara is interested in the essence of the work. Within this context, the lives with layers of memory, the characters defined in the context of time and space, are the artwork itself and the viewer who comes face to face with it. In this sense, essence overlaps with the meaning of mind or imagination. According to the philosophies of existentialists; “every object has an essence and an existence. Essence is the collection of assumed moments tried to be explained through continuity. Being or existence, on the other hand, carries the meaning of being active/present in the world [1].” This perspective, summarizing the philosophy of the New York-centered art movement after World War II, became widespread at the end of the century, creating new art movements gathered around abstract expressions. Devabil Kara met with this understanding in

the years 1996-1997 in America, during the years when she went to conduct research on the Art Market and the Functioning of Art Institutions, precisely when she was heading towards determining her artistic style. In the years when the object left its place to the image, she began to create abstract compositions. While spatial voids symbolize infinity, layers of memory appear within the espaces created with paint texture. Hatching, symbols consisting of spirals, and textural differences are the symbols of the memory layers that Kara hides, conceals, protects, and rescues. They are the imaginings she creates through mediation.

In the wide field of movement of the color stains covering the surface of Kara’s canvases, all images that evoke the illusion of existing spontaneously essentially define the independent and impenetrable nature of the object. Every symbol existing in this void that sets memory free turns into a memory moment that determines the vector quantity, which determines the effect of rotation around a point or axis, as a layer of memory.

Every deceptive phenomenon or feeling dominant in Devabil Kara’s paintings is the analysis of a self-determined description of the external world in the absolute reality of a dominant urge. The paint covering the canvas as a blank surface consists of serene colors that begin and end with a sense of the abyss. The consciousness facing symbols on these colors pursues the determined traces of this imaginary leap with images symbolized sometimes in a chair, sometimes in hatching, and mostly in spirals.

The void, nothingness, and lack of human presence within the pictorial narrative forming Kara’s compositions point to a fullness that creates a contrast to absence. Designed as a field of possibilities, Devabil Kara’s paintings emphasize that the work is a field of possibilities woven with layers of memory. She expects the viewer observing this field, as an investigator, to determine the secrets of the memory layers explained by moments consisting of the selections they will make from these possibilities. While the mental construction dominant in the artist’s pictorial designs enables the viewer to redefine the work, it allows them to continue its formation with their own designs and triggers the use of the concept of time in different sections within the work.

[1] Jean Paul Sartre, Existentialism, trans. Asım Bezirci, Say Publishing, 10th edition 1990, p. 8