Vahap Avşar (Malatya, 1965)
Employing various techniques such as photography, painting, installation, performance and moving image, Vahap Avşar’s works are marked by the influence of conceptual art history. Avşar aims to reveal issues that have remained veiled in our region by using images that are engraved in memories as well as everyday objects and popular culture aesthetics. The artist’s occasionally minimalist and shocking style conceals a critique of power relations, mechanisms of political repression, as well as social violence and conflict.
Lives and works in New York.
In Road to Arguvan (2013) Vahap Avşar focuses on a gigantic crack that was formed in the 1980s on the only road connecting Arguvan, artist’s native town for generations, to the city of Malatya. Depth of the cracks in the asphalt has rendered the road useless, yet the government neither repairs it nor builds a new one. Cut off from the world, gradually deprived of fundamental facilities, and above all the hospital and courthouse, the town was abandoned to its fate. The main image and metaphor of Road to Arguvan is this deep crack. Shot with a hand-held camera, this short, shaky and intensive video full of mystery and associations can be read as a testament of the past and recent sociopolitical conflicts in Turkey. What or who was the cause of this fracture? Was it a natural phenomenon such as an earthquake that displaced the ground, or was it “an unknown force”? What has been happening beneath the earth covered by asphalt? Would it be possible to understand the cause of this rupture by gazing deep into the chasm? Çelenk Bafra, Curator, Istanbul Modern.