Erdem Taşdelen

In this unique event, Erdem Taşdelen will preview a new and never-before-seen body of work through a series of short readings aboard his wrapped *How far do you travel?* bus as it tours through different neighbourhoods of the city.


A detail of Erdem Taşdelen's design. On a dark blue background, white lines draw mathematical graphs and shapes. 

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Erdem Taşdelen reads from The Characters aboard the moving bus

Reading 

As part of Canadian Art Magazines Gallery Day, Vancouver Editor-in-Chief David Balzer discusses the work of Turkish Canadian artist Erdem Taşdelen and his current CAG exhibitions *Wild Child and The Quantified Self Poems*.


A detail image of Erdem Tasdelen's artwork. It looks like an online survey asking about the emotional state of the answerer, including the level of loneliness.

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David Balzer on Erdem Taşdelen

Talk

Erdem Taşdelen will discuss his multidisciplinary practice involving video, installation, sculpture, drawing, and artist books along with recent works on view at the Contemporary Art Gallery. CAG presents two new works by Toronto-based Turkish artist Erdem Taşdelen. Commissioned by CAG in partnership with Cineworks, *Wild Child* is an ambitious two-part video installation which takes as its starting point, *An Historical Account of the Discovery and Education of a Savage Man* by Jean Marc Gaspard Itard, a physician who decided to care for a feral boy found in Aveyron, France in 1798. Convinced that he could “civilize” the boy by teaching him language, Itard was left frustrated in his attempts to make the boy transcend his so-called savagery when he proved incapable of learning to speak.

Presented in our windows is *The Quantified Self Poems*, a new series of twelve screen prints. Over a period of three months in the summer of 2016, Taşdelen reported his moods approximately three times a day on Emotion Sense, a self-improvement smartphone app developed by researchers at the University of Cambridge, UK. As he answered a series of questions the artist’s feelings were numerically encoded as data, effectively quantifying the unquantifiable. Working with programmer Ali Bilgin Arslan, Taşdelen developed an algorithm that translated this information into words drawn from a unique dictionary created by Vancouver-based poet Daniel Zomparelli. Unusual sentences emerge from which we attempt to make some kind of sense.

### Biography

Erdem Taşdelen lives and works in Toronto. His multidisciplinary practice involves a range of media including installation, video, drawing, sculpture, sound and artist books. He has shown extensively internationally and across Canada, including exhibitions at Burrard Arts Foundation, Vancouver (2016); Museum für Neue Kunst, Freiburg (2016); Stacion Center for Contemporary Art, Kosovo (2015); Sakip Sabanci Museum, Istanbul (2015); Galeri NON, Istanbul (2013); Western Front, Vancouver (2013); Biennial of the Americas, Denver (2013); ARTER, Istanbul (2-13); MAK, Vienna (2013); 221A, Vancouver(2012; and Oakville Galleries (2012). 


Throughout 2019, the Contemporary Art Gallery is producing a major public art initiative in partnership with TransLink, Metro Vancouver’s transportation authority. Five Canadian artists — Diyan Achjadi, Patrick Cruz, Rolande Souliere, Erdem Taşdelen and Anna Torma — were commissioned to graphically wrap the exterior of a series of articulated buses traveling on major routes throughout Vancouver. The nature of this project — public transit vehicles enveloped by visual imagery and traversing the space of the city — offers a lyrical opportunity to explore connections between images, meaning and movement. Buses and trains are not the only transit systems that we navigate in our everyday lives: visual images constantly transport ideas and meaning from one place to another. They link and organize histories, spaces and identities. They connect us with others. The English word commute is derived from the Latin *commutare*, which means to change or transform. Each of the five artists featured in this project has an artistic practice that is deeply attentive to the commute of visual language across time and space. This project asks “how far do you travel?”, a question that could well be posed to each rider on the bus, but also to the graphic imagery that Achjadi, Cruz, Souliere, Taşdelen and Torma use to interrogate how and why images move and communicate through time and place.

Curated by Kimberly Phillips, with assistance from Julia Lamare

This project is produced in partnership with TransLink.

ProgramGuideWinter2019.pdf

A graphic pattern made up of a purple, blue and green geometric background with various illustrations of buildings, swirling clouds, imaginary birds and plants superimposed on top.

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An image of the exterior of a transit bus that is wrapped in a patterned vinyl. The vinyl pattern is made up of a purple and blue geometric background with various illustrations superimposed on top.

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An image of the exterior of a transit bus that is wrapped in a patterned vinyl. The vinyl pattern is made up of a plain pink background with abstract illustrations of various forms and shapes. 

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An image of the exterior of a transit bus wrapped in a patterned vinyl. The imagery on the vinyl resembles blueprint-like geometric shapes, composed of thin white lines on a dark blue background. 

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An image of the exterior of a transit bus that is wrapped in a patterned vinyl. The vinyl pattern is made up black pictographic imagery on a white background.   

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An image of the exterior of a transit bus wrapped in patterned vinyl. The pattern is composed of road work caution tape, with arrow-like shapes alternating from yellow and black to red and white.

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Diyan Achjadi, Patrick Cruz, Rolande Souliere, Erdem Taşdelen, Anna Torma

How far do you travel?

The Contemporary Art Gallery presents two new works by Toronto-based Turkish artist Erdem Taşdelen. Commissioned by the Contemporary Art Gallery with Cineworks, *Wild Child,* presented in CAG’s North Gallery, is an ambitious two-part video installation which takes as its starting point *An Historical Account of the Discovery and Education of a Savage Man* by Jean Marc Gaspard Itard, a physician who decided to care for a feral boy found in Aveyron, France in 1798. Convinced that he could “civilize” the boy by teaching him language, Itard was left frustrated in his attempts to make the boy transcend his so-called savagery when he proved incapable of learning to speak.

In *Wild Child* Taşdelen adapts this story, this time set in contemporary British Columbia and presented through two distinct elements. One video depicts preparations for an imagined filmed documentary, featuring twelve actors as they audition for the roles of its main characters. This is accompanied by a second piece, a sequence of images of a forest depicting “nature” in a supposedly unmediated manner. Devoid of any human activity, it provides the viewer with a space of contemplation in contrast to the interactions portrayed between performers, crew and writer/director.

Presented in our windows is *The Quantified Self Poems*, a new series of twelve screen prints. Over a period of three months in the summer of 2016, Taşdelen reported his moods approximately three times a day on “Emotion Sense,” a self-improvement smartphone app developed by researchers at the University of Cambridge, UK. As he answered a series of questions the artist’s feelings were numerically encoded as data, effectively quantifying the unquantifiable. Working with programmer Ali Bilgin Arslan, Taşdelen developed an algorithm that translated this information into words drawn from a unique dictionary created by Vancouver-based poet Daniel Zomparelli. Unusual sentences emerge from which we attempt to make some kind of sense.

Each work exposes the dynamics at play through differing representations of human nature. Notionally objective realities conflate with fiction in a self-referential manner that deliberately befuddles the viewer; the familiar made compelling strange.

*Wild Child* is commissioned by Contemporary Art Gallery with Cineworks and is supported by BC Arts Council.

*The Quantified Self Poems* is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and produced with thanks to Daniel Zomparelli and Ali Bilgin Arslan.


### Biography

Erdem Taşdelen lives and works in Toronto. His multidisciplinary practice involves a range of media including installation, video, drawing, sculpture, sound and artist books. He has shown extensively internationally and across Canada, including exhibitions at Burrard Arts Foundation, Vancouver; Museum für Neue Kunst, Freiburg (2016); Stacion Center for Contemporary Art, Kosovo; Sakip Sabanci Museum, Istanbul (2015); Galeri NON, Istanbul; Western Front, Vancouver; Kunstverein Hannover; Biennial of the Americas, Denver; ARTER, Istanbul; Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich; MAK, Vienna (2013); 221A, Vancouver and Oakville Galleries (2012).




ProgramGuideWinter2017.pdf

A video still with an image of a lush forest in British Columbia. Sunlight is streaming through the moss covered trees. 

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A monitor hangs on the wall of a dark gallery space. The monitor displays an image of a lush forest in British Columbia.

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A monitor displaying a video work hangs on the wall of a dark gallery space. Onscreen, an actor sits at a table, auditioning for an imagined documentary.

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An exterior image of CAG installed with 12 black and white, text-based prints in the facade windows.

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Two windows outside of CAG installed with a text-based print each. One print has a poem printed in black text on white paper. The other has a poem printed in white text on back paper.

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Wild Child | The Quantified Self Poems

Diyan Achjadi
*The catch of a tiger*, 2019
silkscreen on paper
8.75 x 8.75 inches
Edition of 250 in four variations
Unframed

Diyan Achjadi’s artistic practice is concerned with print media’s fundamental role in the transit of knowledge throughout the world. Her work is a critical response to the cross-cultural influences, contaminations and fantastical imaginings that result from the colonial project. For many years she has been interested in how the decorative arts — particularly wallpapers, textiles and ceramics — are presumed to be innocent, ornamental backdrops to social life, but contain politically potent imagery that serves to perpetuate powerful assumptions around gender, race and nationhood. Extending from Achjadi’s participation in CAG’s major public art initiative, *How far do you travel?*, presented in partnership with TransLink aboard Vancouver buses throughout 2019, *The catch of a tiger* presents a swirling, riotous reconfiguration of traditional Chinoiserie plate design that depicts an imagined Indonesia — its landscapes, architecture and fauna, which with Achjadi’s deft printmaking skills seep outside their borders and boundaries.


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The catch of a tiger, 2019

Diyan Achjadi

Rooted in conceptualism, Erdem Taşdelen’s multidisciplinary practice brings self-expression into question within the context of culturally learned behaviours. *The Curtain Sweeps Down* is a book adaptation of the artist’s 2017 mixed media installation with the same title, and explores the story behind a novel published in Turkey in 1950. The project offers a semi-fictionalized narrative of the events surrounding the publication of this novel through a constellation of images and text, and looks at how womanhood is figured in the Turkish collective imaginary. An assemblage of found images, archival material, news headlines and texts written by the artist, *The Curtain Sweeps Down* underscores the systematic ways in which certain voices are muted while others are permitted to enter into the mainstream, and considers self-concealment as a strategic tool to advance progressive politics in environments where open dissent may be too risky.

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The Curtain Sweeps Down

This book, published in 2010, compiles Erdem Taşdelen’s word-based artwork *Dear,*. The twenty-four anonymous, undated and very personal letters that make up *Dear,* seem to be suspended in a first-draft state. Reading closely, it becomes clear that this is not a correspondence but rather a one-sided exchange between the author and themselves. The letters disclose their most private reflections while simultaneously challenging the authenticity of these feelings with analytic detachment. The typed texts have been anxiously marked up and corrected by hand, and in exasperation – a second-guessing that harangues the writer for breaks in logic, improper syntax and evasive or vague passages. At other times, the editor’s fidgety revisions pause to helpfully smooth and polish an acceptable phrase or to comment that a passage exemplifies “the postmodern condition.” At one point, even the sentiment “I hope one day we can just let ourselves be ourselves around each other” has been worried with a complicated re-working. The project approaches the act of writing as an exercise in self-reflexivity, an inward gaze rather than a means of communicating with another.


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Dear,

*All The Decisive Blows: A book of quotes on the left hand* is an artist book by Erdem Taşdelen which consists of a collection of quotes on the left hand by a series of well-known individuals including philosophers, artists, actors and musicians. Gathered over a year, these quotes serve as a catalogue of our collective understanding of the left hand. The book, which is designed in reverse so that the pages turn from left to right, takes its title from a quote from Walter Benjamin: “These are the days when no one should rely unduly on his competence. Strength lies in improvisation. All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.”

This publication is an edition of 500 and was printed on the occasion of the exhibition *A Petition of the Left Hand* at NON, Istanbul in September 2014.

Erdem Taşdelen

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