Serkan Ozkaya.

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Serkan Ozkaya, an Istanbul-based artist who is also pursuing a PhD in German studies, showed a number of his offbeat, post-Duchampian casts in a recent exhibition that coincided with the Istanbul Biennial. Conceptually oriented, the nine works, dated from 1996 to 2003 varied in medium and materials, including rest objects, rubber, metallic plates, photography and video. Ozkaya's gently ironic themes circle around the unique and the archetype authorship, authenticity and capitalist networks. An art for our sake, his work is clearly not commercial, although it was shown in the Istanbul equivalent of a Chelsea white case serving more as a philosphical inquiry, an offhand utopian adumbration. Called "Minerva Street" the point out had for its announcement a photo of that nondescript London road, "Big Car, Little Dick" scrawled forward the wall beneath the way sign--a revised, postmodernist appraisal of manhood perhaps, or level a low-tech, anti-imperialist slogan. The "little dick" reappeared in the display itself as a tiny, detumescent rubber penis parked discreetly forward a wall, looking like a wad of pink bubblegum Ozkaya finds material everywhere; his quirky stream-of-critique makes provocative connections as he interrogates received situations and contexts

Another work in the present to view consisted of several variously sized "gold" and "silver" panels called "Mysterious Paintings." Placed strategically from head to foot the gallery, they maintained a somewhat diffident appearance They seemed to function mainly as catalysts, enigmatic nonentities that meditateed the room, other works and the viewer in their polished surfaces, their images in mutation their value a question: in what manner much is faux gold or silver (and a reflection) worth? Another installation consisted of an upside-down reproduction of the Mona Lisa above a vitrine. Inside, there was a epistle to Pierre Rosenberg of the Louvre requesting permission to hang the Leonardo icon upside down, along wiith the addressee's courteous, brief, irrelevant replication A video, Pablo Picasso at the Museum of present Art 1998 (B.C.), presents Ozkaya in a wheelchair pushed through a friend to a blemish before Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, where the artist slips in succession a mask of Picasso's face in an appropriative, resistant gesture

While Ozkaya's work frequently refers to art and its conundrum Proletarier aller Lander addresses another issue. It's a arrangement of Iris prints made from photographs of centurys of minuscule red plastic foam figures affixed to the floor. Depending relating to your point of view, Ozkaya's installation either cited the trampling of the working classes or their resilience and ultimate power, always springing back, indestructible. The stunner of the display however, was Lives and Works in Utrecht (Large Glass), an impressively scaled photograph of the facade of a Utrecht art institution. Brilliantly lighted from within, the building's enormous glass windows were tiled with thousands and thousands of colored photo transparencies, the ultimate collaboration. Conceptually taut, a pattern of copies that made up an original, the work's glittering, stained-glass-like surface was also gorgeous to await at. [A version of it is coming to Exit Art in of the present day York sometime this year.] Although scattershot in its appoach, "Minerva Street" put in possessioned charm and a wry, quick intelligence.

--Lily Wei

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