ISTANBUL.- The Pera Museum announced its new exhibition Doublethink: Double Vision. Curated by Alistair Hicks, the exhibition title alludes to George Orwell’s seminal work 1984 and presents a selection that includes Tracey Emin, Marcel Dzama, Anselm Kiefer, Bruce Nauman, Raymond Pettibon, and Thomas Ruff, as well as Turkish artists, tracing the steps of pluralistic thought through works of art.
The exhibition presents a new balance between text and image, which is a result of having to think differently. 'You probably think of Doublethink as a negative concept. We in Russia think of it as just the beginning,' says Russian artist, Pavel Pepperstein. The exhibition starts with Moscow Conceptualists who were not acknowledged as artists by the state in 1970s and 80s, so had to form a new way of communication and the exhibition fluidly showcases a new balance in thinking between text and image through the work of 34 artists from all around the world.
Studying the friction between the visual and the verbal and aiming to point at the radical transformation experienced in ways of thinking under doublethink, the exhibition presents the works of these artists: Yuri Albert, Nikita Alexeev, Kader Attia, Sarnath Banerjee, Erik Bulatov, Hera Büyüktaşçıyan, Olga Chernysheva, Aslı Çavuşoğlu, Marilá Dardot, Marcel Dzama, Tracey Emin, Merike Estna, Claire Fontaine, Sandra Gamarra, Duan Jianyu, Ali Kazma, William Kentridge, Waqas Khan, Anselm Kiefer, Galim Madanov and Zauresh Terekbay, Marko Mäetamm, Mónica de Miranda, Ciprian Mureşan, Arkadiy Nasonov, Bruce Nauman, Pavel Pepperstein, Raymond Pettibon, RAQS Media Collective, Thomas Ruff, Nedko Solakov, Erdem Taşdelen, Gavin Turk, Keith Tyson, Yangjiang Group.
Curator Alistair Hicks maintains that Orwell invented the concept of “doublethink” to show the control of the state over the mind of the individual; he defines the word as “the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in your mind at the same time and believe in both of them,” and adds that “In 1984 the State used Doublethink to ignore anything but its own ‘correct’ thinking.” Hicks asserts that “Today doublethink is our only hope, and artists from around the world are showing how to develop not just doublethink, but polythink, thinking along multiple parallel or tangential lines at the same time.”
The aim of this exhibition is to demonstrate that there has been a radical change of thinking all around the world. Doublethink may have blossomed in Russia and other Communist states, but “Big Brother” has materialized in many different shapes and forms around the world, so artists have come up with an even wider range of coping mechanisms. The exhibition Doublethink: Double Vision focuses on artists finding a new balance between text and image and is on view at Pera Museum, Istanbul, Turkey between 25 May 2017 - 06 August 2017.
