Sidar Baki Game Goes On

C.A.M. Gallery finishes the year 2020 with the ‘Game Goes On’ exhibition by Sidar Baki. This series is reflections of aprocess in which the artist has sought new ways of expression and texture in his work by preserving fictional values of his paintings and the permanence of his main themes during his journey of creation.

“By showing a child playing in this intermediate space, Sidar is making a reference to the nature vs. culture dilemma that we have mentioned. Furthermore, here the notion of ‘game’ is coming into play. Art is a game and the human being plays with nature! Game is a mode of existence and a means of human evolution. It is culture itself. And the work draws us back to that idea: playing games is related to imagination. At a stage when nature has come to an end, playing games is a way to draw nature to a place of imagination.”

Hasan Bülent Kahraman

Baki claims: “What I experience is the case of a human being who lives in a chunk of concrete which surrenders our environment and intensifies day by day… The children’s stories that I place in abandoned spaces or the areas which make us struggle to identify… the children who play independently from the place, their games show us their borderless imagination and dreams… Game gives a sense of trust to kids. Consequently, the place loses its importance.” By these words, he explains the fiction of place-kid-game that he emphasizes abundantly in his paintings.

For Sidar Baki, both art and game are ways of creating a new fictional world in order to distance one’s self from the real world. Humans, while occupying art, feel as if they are detached from the notion of time; it’s similar to the phenomenon known as “flow” where, while we are playing we do not notice how the time goes by. Both are emancipating actions. “Trying to paint what exists today is an act of resistance which stimulates hope,” claims John Berger in one of his essays; Baki’s paintings can also be seen as forms in between shapes and artistic material riveted together, stimulating hope.