Conceived around the notions of “home” and “homeland”, the group exhibition The Sky Was Candy brings together works by 24 artists from the Arter Collection. Produced in a range of media including painting, photography, installation, sculpture and video, these works – some of which have joined the collection only recently – invite us to (re)connect with the houses entrusted with cherished memories or painful sorrows, the earth that layers our belongings, the homes we leave behind or carry within us, and the foreign lands we journey toward in search of a better future. Gathered under one roof within a spatial arrangement that stimulates a ceaseless shift of perspective between interior and exterior, they compose a vibratory and multi-hued sensory field stretching between earth and sky, past and future, rootedness and uprootedness.
Suggestive of an outdoor scene infused with childlike sensation, the exhibition’s title draws inspiration from the opening stanza of E. E. Cummings’ "Songs I" (1938). This picturesque phrase that turns the world into something “edible” and colourful by bringing together words that don’t habitually coexist addresses the ways memory and imagination filter reality, while retaining an abstract quality that allows for multiple interpretations. Finding home and returning home – those two fundamental endeavours that intertwine dwelling and journeying – are evoked by numerous works on display, only to be reconsidered in light of contemporary geopolitical fractures and social turmoil. Whether recalling domestic interiors filled with everyday objects and traces possessing palpable presence, repositories of stories weighted with gravity, or promises of faraway lands, these works unfold the existential, political, cultural, historical, personal and poetic layers of our dwellings. They invite us to reimagine and reformulate our conception of belonging beyond geography and possession in a world where the trajectories of all of us – driven by the desire to be welcomed somewhere and of constructing a bulwark against loss – are increasingly shaped by maps and the tightening of borders across the globe.
The works featured in the exhibition The Sky Was Candy approach the notions of “home” and “homeland” not as an origin, a lost Eden, a foreseeable destination or an immovable site, but rather as a living and constantly evolving relationship to space, time and memory. Assembled and recontextualised through the framework of the exhibition, they reveal in passing that we may at times feel most at home when we are not at home or even in places where we have never set foot. The spatial shifts of the exhibition’s arrangement, which generate moments of disorientation while opening apertures toward the outside, reinforce the idea that our relationship to “home” is never self-evident, for home is a remarkable knot of temporalities and affects that outgrows rigid definitions. Rather than attempting to resolve this complexity, The Sky Was Candy proposes to seek appropriate forms and textures for bearing witness to the soul, character and consciousness of our homes, in their plurality.
Artists: Melike Abasıyanık Kurtiç, Adel Abidin, Lene Adler Petersen, Ahu Akgün, Francesco Albano, Hüseyin Bahri Alptekin, Gökhun Baltacı, Yto Barrada, Mehtap Baydu, Elina Brotherus, Fatma Bucak, Elif Erkan, Ayşe Erkmen, Dan Graham, Karl Horst Hödicke, Fatoş İrwen, Arthur Köpcke, Inge Mahn, Yıldız Moran, Ahmet Öğüt, Sophia Pompéry, Gerhard Rühm, Stéphanie Saadé, Stefan Wewerka.
