Müge Yılmaz’s performances, photographs and installations draw on feminist science fiction, and inquire into intertwined social, personal and environmental histories. Mining the deep past as well as an imagined future, Yılmaz’s Eleven Suns is an installation reflecting on the advent of human, plant and animal life, on devotion and scarcity, and on the Anthropocene after capitalism, culture and nature have expired. The installation is bringing cave, temple and shrine iconography from the past together with Yılmaz’s own drawings of hybrid plant-human-animals and speculative future ruins. The work can be described as a future archaeology incorporating leftovers of our own times.
Müge Yılmaz, (b. 1985, Istanbul, Turkey) lives and works in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Her research presents speculative narratives about the future through photography, performance and installation. Recent exhibitions include Loops, De APPEL, Amsterdam (2018); Meeting the Universe Halfway, Kunst im Tunnel, Düsseldorf (2018); Performatik17, Brussels (2017); Night Eyes, M HKA, Antwerp (2017); and Why Not Ask Again?, 11th Shanghai Biennial (2016). She has been a resident artist at Asia Culture Center (2016) and is alumna of Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten (2013-2014) in Amsterdam.
EXHIBITED WORKS
Eleven suns, 2019
Various stones, objects and water containers
Dimensions variable
Eleven suns - Vulture (Gyps) I, 2019
CNC-cut, hand-carved birch
148 × 2 × 121 cm
Eleven suns - Vulture (Gyps) II, 2019
CNC-cut, hand-carved birch
146 × 2 × 120 cm
Eleven suns - Anatolian Leopard (Panthera Pardus Tulliana) I, 2019
CNC-Cut, hand-carved birch
154 × 2 × 120 cm
Eleven suns - Anatolian Leopard (Panthera Pardus Tulliana) II, 2019
CNC-Cut, hand-carved birch
122 × 2 × 138 cm
Eleven suns – Elysia, 2019
CNC-Cut, hand-carved birch
209 × 2 × 97 cm
Eleven suns - Tamgaly Goddess, 2019
CNC-Cut, hand-carved birch
192 × 2 × 122 cm
Eleven suns - Snake Sun, 2019
CNC-Cut, hand-carved Birch
187 × 2 × 111 cm
Eleven suns - Cereuses, 2019
CNC-Cut, hand-carved birch
121 × 2 × 171 cm
Eleven suns - Cymolixas (Multiflagellates), 2019
CNC-Cut, hand-carved birch
118 × 2 × 188 cm
Eleven suns - Phycodurus Eques, 2019
CNC-Cut, hand-carved birch
121 × 2 × 167 cm
Eleven suns - Simurgh (Konruk), 2019
CNC-Cut, hand-carved birch
190 × 2 × 94 cm
Courtesy the artist.
Commissioned by the 16th Istanbul Biennial.
Produced with the support of Mondriaan Fund, Zafer
Yıldırım and SAHA–Supporting Contemporary Art from Turkey.
Presented with the support of Consulate General of the
Kingdom of the Netherlands in Istanbul.
