Cansu Çakar

Tate St Ives | Cornwall, United Kingdom

As part of SAHA's collaboration with the Tate St Ives museum in the United Kingdom in 2020, Cansu Çakar's solo exhibition titled New Rarities will be on view between 19 October 2024 - 5 January 2025.

Çakar's exhibition is the third solo exhibition after Hera Büyüktaşcıyan's Eartbound Whisperers in May 2023 and Burçak Bingöl's Minor Vibrations on Earth in October 2022. The miniaturist- inspired painting installation is the result of two residencies in St Ives, undertaken by Çakar in 2024, during which she became interested in representations of seashells, imagining them as both homes and graves. Laboriously derived from murex sea snails, Tyrian purple was named for its origins in Tyre, a centre of the ancient civilisation of Phoenicia that spread from modern-day Lebanon to trade and settle across the Mediterranean. This rare dye has been used to colour many precious artefacts through time. In parallel, tin from Cornwall and Devon was also a valuable resource across the ancient world. Çakar’s installation re-examines concepts of value, rarity and cultural heritage by speculatively tracing such ancient trade routes, real or imagined. Unfolding across a shell-like spiral of paper resembling an ancient map, it offers a story guided more by oral traditions than historical records.

Cansu Çakar (1988, İstanbul)

earned a bachelor's degree in the Traditional Turkish Arts Department at Dokuz Eylül University of Fine Arts. Her work is about blending traditional art forms, such as illumination design and miniature painting, with contemporary art practices and topics. By doing so, she challenges the stereotypical classification of traditional expressions and highlights her desire to set them free. In her drawings, paintings, and workshops, she delves into male-dominated subjects through her unique personal investigation and storytelling, which typically center on social, historical, and architectural topics, including expected roles for women, as well as historical and contemporary interpretations of Near Eastern and Mediterranean cultures. Her works create a symbolic dialogue that hints at the seeming contradiction and continuity of traditions in today's world. Believing that a symbolic language never dies but instead changes forms and survives within the confines of commonly approved norms, she aims to recreate an old visual language that's often considered dead by intervening forces of the living. As such, she redefines the traditional format of miniature in her artistic practice, even while working in long-established styles herself. The artist's interest in the tradition of collective thinking and production is central to her work and informs her practice through her workshops. During these activities, she draws a line between what it means to be a woman or a prisoner in an oppressive society and the aesthetics of traditional art in our contemporary art world. Ultimately, both share the search for a pluralistic language against conservatism and the need for emancipation.

About Tate St Ives
Alongside Tate Modern, Tate Britain and Tate Liverpool, Tate had formed a close link with St Ives when it took over the management of the Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden in 1980. As a result of the large number of visitors at the gallery, it was decided to refurbish and extend Tate St Ives. The making of the new Tate St Ives completed in summer 2017.