Preview: Day Craving Night, Spike Island

For her forthcoming exhibition at Spike Island – her most ambitious in the UK to date – Stockholm-based Turkish artist Meriç Algün presents a series of recent works that examine love and desire in relation to boundaries and separation. Throughout the exhibition, Day Craving Night, Algün considers the threat to love (and the environment) in a world obsessed with individualism, borders and consumer culture.

In the face of global warming and the rise of racism, terrorism, separatism and consumerism, Algün’s exhibition evokes the idea of the togetherness under threat, and it advocates for a more tolerant and kinder society where difference is accepted and embraced.

“In a time of deep social and political divide in the UK, Meriç Algün’s work appears to be incredibly relevant,” explains curator Carmen Juliá. “Over the last decade, she has developed a body of work rooted in her experience of migration from Istanbul to Stockholm. The contrasting differences – social and political – between both cities played a key role in these works concerned with issues of identity, borders, bureaucracy, language and translation.”

A central work, Finding the Edge (2017), consists of a free-standing shelving unit cut into seven sections that correspond proportionally with the surface area of each of the seven continents. Similarly, the gaps between the rows of shelves relate to the surface area of the oceans.

Section from Finding the Edge (2017) by Meriç Algün 

The work takes us back to the Paleozoic era when all the continents formed a contiguous land mass, Pangaea. The shelves display a variety of objects ranging from ferns and animal fossils, to earth globes, handmade books, videos and sculptures. Algün here draws parallels between the separation of the continents and the origins of human desire.

The piece takes its title from a chapter in Eros the Bittersweet (1986) by Canadian author Anne Carson. “In the interval between reach and grasp, between glance and counterglance, between ‘I love you’ and ‘I love you too’, the absent presence of desire comes alive,” Carson writes.

“Eros, the Greek god of love, denotes want, lack and desire for that which is missing,” Carmen elucidates. “As such, according to Carson, the experience of ‘eros’ as ‘lack’ alerts a person to the boundaries of him/herself, of other people and of things in general.

“Day Craving Night speaks of our desire to constantly search for that which we believe we are missing. The exhibition tackles many of the issues that were raised in the essay The Agony of Eros (2017) by the Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han. For Han, love requires the courage to accept self-negation for the sake of discovering the Other (difference).

“In a world of fetishized individualism and technologically mediated social interaction, it is the Other (difference) that is eradicated, not the self. In today’s increasingly narcissistic society, we have come to look for love and desire within the ‘inferno of the same’.”

“We are excited to be featuring Meriç’s work, because her subjects connect with many of the issues that confront us today. She strikes the right balance between the personal and the factual, and has developed a practice that is driven by intense research, but leaves plenty of room for intuition. As such, her work can offer different levels of engagement with the public – and hopefully her subjects will resonate beyond the gallery walls.”

Meriç Algün: Day Craving Night is at Spike Island from Sept 28 to Dec 8. For more info, visit www.spikeisland.org.uk/programme/exhibitions/meric-algun

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