Category: Individual Exhbitions

Damla’s work is on view in “The Artist’s Studio is Her Bedroom” at the CAG, on until April 5! Curated by Kimberly Phillips.

”Working across experimental mark-making, textiles and performance, Damla Tamer negotiates the relationships between aesthetics and politics, particularly the links between representation, intention, anticipation and agency. State violence in her native Turkey, her experience of motherhood and her work as a contract university instructor all influence her practice. Her ongoing series Divination Objects (2019-2020) draws upon a traditional ikat weaving technique, where threads are dyed in areas before being woven into a design. These works literally weave together cut-apart ink drawings, wherein she explores the weight of gravity as a physical force (crucially experienced during a baby’s first year), with shredded compositions containing phrases from her teaching evaluations (now standard practice within the neoliberal university, contributing to risk-averse pedagogy and labour precarity). The warp and weft each hold traces of their materials’ previous information, but now with misalignments, seepage and glitches. For Tamer, they call up artist Hito Steyerl’s sobering claim that we can no longer fight vertical power with horizontality, and ask instead for a more nuanced response to that power.” — From the Curatorial Text

https://www.contemporaryartgallery.ca/

Image: Divination Objects (ink on paper, woven).
Dimensions variable, approx. 50 x 32 inches. 2019-2020