Ayşe Erkmen

1949 | Istanbul, Turkey

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Ayşe Erkmen — AWARE Women artists / Femmes artistes

Sponsor

— Galerie Dirimart

Turkish sculptor and artist.

Ayşe Erkmen studied sculpture at the Mimar Sinan University and graduated in 1977. In 1993 she took part in the DAAD International Artist Residency Programme in Berlin. She then continued to spend time in both Berlin and Istanbul, becoming a teacher at the Kunsthochschule Kassel and then at the Münster Kunstakademie. She first and foremost sets out aesthetic strategies and profound reflections on the artistic process and its reach. Her sculptures can be objects, installations, and photographs, as well as basic technical interventions. She each of the spatial dimensions, not only to invent new shapes but also to reveal some of a space’s own qualities, features that are present yet concealed. Developed as phenomenological concepts, her works can be read on different levels. Often designed for specific times and places, her works are akin to architecture and navigate in a world of highly diverse shapes and materials: for her installation Between You and I (2011), the artist covered the Rotterdam Art Centre with a turquoise nylon skin; in Crystal Rock (2008), a large stone mass was placed on the roof of a skyscraper.

A. Erkmen represented Turkey at the 2011 Venice Biennale with Plan B, a poetic and ironic installation that revealed the complex relationship between Venice’s architecture and its water: red, green, blue, and purple pipes, just like a network of blood vessels, linked machines and transformed the Arsenale exhibition venue into a room for purification. Thus purified, the water was redirected into the Grand Canal.

Maïa Kantor

Translated from French by Jo Garden.

From the Dictionnaire universel des créatrices
© Éditions des femmes – Antoinette Fouque, 2013
© Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions, 2019