Mercury in Retrograde

Art-ist publications initiated the Contemporary Art Series of artist books on promising emerging artists, who don?t have a published book on their practice yet, with Ahmet Ö?üt: Informal Incidents (2008), followed by Bashir Borlakov: Fictional Reality (2009), Can Altay: Pigeons are People (2010) and A ?ener Özmen Book (2011). The series aims at documenting practices as they manifest and creating a space to evaluate each artist?s practice through most of their works. Mercury in Retrograde is the fifth book in the series, which focuses on Asl? Çavu?o?lu?s artistic production since 2004.

In her works, Asl? questions the audience?s relationship with reality through her daring interventions in space and time. No matter what the topic is, her works reflect the process and the coincidences invoked by the artist that result in layered interpretations. In the universe that you are about to encounter in this book, linear relationships and narratives don?t work. We can only perceive the works as a constellation of time/space compressions, which impact each other in multiple dimensions.

You can imagine that an artist, who is dealing with the fictional nature of historiography and placing herself at the center of experiences that shape her work, would not let somebody else edit the narrative about her practice. The interpretations you will come across are only some possibilities articulated from now and the same works might appear with completely different meanings in the future.

In this book, you might be looking for a narrative of Asl? Çavu?o?lu and her artistic practice but you might find something else.