ISTANBUL.- Pi Artworks is pleased to present Scent of Time, Nancy Atakan’s 8th solo exhibition with the gallery, featuring her watercolour paintings inspiring her needlework that touches upon revisiting, rethinking and reimagining in light of a subjective experience of time.

Atakan’s visual language draws on the repercussions of historical, cultural and societal transformations which are fostered in the mind and legible on the body, creating a juxtaposition of images belonging to a past and in the making of a future. The act of remembering is definitive of her works and carried out through her poems either embroidered on cloth or heard over video works.

Scent of Time revolves around the construction of time in individual consciousness, an amalgam of our perception, memory and imagination defying the irrevocable passage of time by the arbitrary numbers on a clock while forming a unity of all experiences for the self. This unique construction, born out of insight, is explored throughout the exhibition mimicking a cyclical structure of time, “thoughts on thoughts” overlapping and lingering just like scent does.

Forming the backbone of the exhibition, “Searching for the Scent of Time” made in 2022 is a revisit to the time when Nancy was collecting antique table clocks from flea markets while being followed through the lens of filmmaker Dilek Aydın, for a documentary in the making about the artist. Throughout the show, those clocks appear in different mediums - on handkerchiefs, in a video, as a part of a sculpture - as symbolic and material objects, each opening an illusory window in time to the intangible place of memories.

In the search for the threads of the distinguishable but inseparable moments of life, she often makes use of collages in an attempt to disclose time, disguised in many roles, ever-mutating the meanings attached to personal experiences and leaving the one in the act of remembering to incessantly shift their perception and judgement.

Exhibition Assistant: Can Küçük

"Playing with Paper Dolls” a documentary on Nancy Atakan helmed by Dilek Aydın who serves as a producer, along with director Letisya Tapanis in production.