July 23, 2020 from 8:00 PM – 10:00 PM

Plexus Projects is pleased to present a solo exhibition of work by Sinem Dişli. Echo will be featured in Vitrine, an ongoing screening series of moving image artworks.

*Please note projections are viewed from the sidewalk. The project space is not open during Vitrine screen hours.

Echo
After spending a while photographing “gülle”-players, I decided to look into the creation process of these artifacts. In the past, players used to craft their own orbs as children and some of them kept rolling for their entire lives. Just as these “gülle”s are being thrown from hand to hand on the soil, in some cases, they were even passed from one generation to the other. After some research and chasing, I was finally introduced to one of the few individuals known to still make these orbs. On our first encounter, he was anything but willing to demonstrate his craft. Today it is considered childish and disgraceful to be involved in this game. Eventually, we ended up walking on the outskirts of the city together. 80 years old, Bahri Hicri searched for specific pieces of rock using various means such as weighing or licking them. Depending on how hard the stone was, he reported, it usually took him around a week to make one “gülle” manually. For me listening to the sound being produced by the shaping of these orbs was as if listening to sounds that were possibly echoing during the construction of Göbekli Tepe.

Sinem Dişli is a New York and Istanbul based artist dealing with cultural diversity and multidisciplinary features of photography to unravel the mysteries of the universe in relation to archaeology and geology. Along with her solo exhibitions ​İntiba, Sürgün, Cereyan and Rutubet, she also participated in numerous group exhibitions in Europe and the USA. She was awarded by the Triangle Arts Residency program and ISCP in 2015. She joined the Cosmos section of the 2016 and 2017 Arles Photography Festival and A Pillar of Smoke-A look at Turkey’s Contemporary Scene in 2018. The New York Times listed her as “7 Promising Photographers to Watch at At Arles Festival” in 2018. Dişli is the co-founder of independent artist-run spaces, Ayzart in New York; TOZ and HER HÂL Kolektif in Istanbul. Her last work, ‘Hollows and Mounds: A Take on Göbeklitepe’, is exhibited at the Ara Güler Museum and Leica Gallery Istanbul.