Merve Çanakçı Megabytes Uploaded to the Cloud

Megabytes Uploaded to the Cloud is an intensive summary of Çanakçı's artistic production, which dates back to the early 2000s, that wraps the contemporary with the past: The artist has blended things she has touched, heard, smelled, tasted and seen over the years composed in a variety of forms. The different techniques she has always applied on misprinted fabrics combine with mediums such as drawing, photography and sound installation to create Çanakçı's emotional geography and draw the viewer into an impressive narrative where fragments of both the present and the past are intertwined. The artist envisions this intricate narrative form with the words "(...) I see them as scattered fragments of space belonging to another world."

The exhibition takes its name from the sentence "(...) am I megabytes uploaded to the cloud?" from the Italian writer Domenico Starnone's novel "Ties". The term usually refers to transferring data over the internet to a cloud storage service, with the unit of measurement "Megabyte" describing various files such as images/audio/text. What is accumulated through perception is stored mentally on the one hand and digitally somewhere in space at the same time. In this context, the expression shows a kind of interconnectedness with Çanakçı's long-standing oeuvre of collecting, storing and finding. Instead of old albums, "clouds" form a form of remembering between the past and the present, expressed in codes.

The works in the exhibition form a loop between the concepts of mourning, memory and birth through their names and visuals. The New World Garden series, created by the articulation of twelve collage works of drawings and photographs, and Sorrow, an installation of embroidered antique kitchen linens, creates a unique visual world. It offers an activist narrative, both personal and impersonal, about seeing difference and irregularity. Acrylic and oil paintings on found fabrics present a recording of the subjective which reaches out to the viewer's memory. The combination of the organic and the inorganic invites the viewer to delve into ambiguous and yet familiar stories.