Gallery LINART brings together contemporary art enthusiasts with a mixed exhibition titled “Batteries Not Included” featuring the works of Arda Yalkın, Hande Şekerciler and Engin Beyaz.

In today’s metropolis life we are witnessing an era in which every moment we live, every breath we take are packed and offered for sale to us. Our life, on the one hand, gets simplified with the technological advances and other kinds of developments; on the other hand, it becomes complicated and makes us breathless, introverted and uncommunicative. Aware of everything around us, but at the same time living unwittingly in our fake worlds, we always want more, gets more, but somehow do not get enough. As individuals of a society living for the sake of consuming rather than consuming for living, the half of our daily lives is spent with the encoding of the system in us “what goods we need to buy”, while the other half running after what we missed in the context of life experiences as well as meta. Numbed and unsatisfied in this way, we are actually experiencing chronic fatigue or irrational violence as the unexpected results of dissenting against the labour exploitation and pressure of extreme consumption as Baudrillard mentions. This exhibition presents us the system in which we live and its consequences through the works of Arda Yalkın, Hande Şekerciler and Engin Beyaz.

Arda Yalkın invites us to look more closely at the individual who is not questioning enough and unaware of the facts by bringing us the backgrounds of all systems of which we are actors, with thousands of images. The illusion of the system that makes us feel better when we “have more” forms the starting point of his works.

Hande Şekerciler reveals the thoughts of the individual held in the background, the fine line between fantasy and insanity. The figures moving in contrast with the loveable external appearances point to not physical though but emotional violence today we've had to ourselves and each other.

Engin Beyaz, while discovering the shadows of Istanbul as the city of dreams he imagines, actually shows us the invisible walls between metropolitan people, the patterns and dogmas limiting these people through individuals who appear to be in communication but introverted and unwitting, with only one difference: now the scene is not Plato's cave, but the city where we are!

-Gallery LiNART

Image: © Arda Yalkin
Courtesy of Gallery LiNART