Sevil Dolmacı Dubai is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition in Dubai of one of the institutionalized names of Turkish contemporary art, Elvan Alpay. Titled "Game Over. Let's Stop Now." will take place from November 26, 2024-January 1, 2025 and will feature works in different media and sizes created by the artist after a six-year hiatus. With a selection of 33 works, the exhibition will introduce Elvan Alpay's art to art lovers in the United Arab Emirates.
Throughout her artistic career of nearly 40 years, Elvan Alpay has worked on nature and its manifestations, reflecting on the possibilities of nature and the possibility of using these possibilities to the fullest. On the other hand, she emphasized that it is necessary to ask questions within limits, that limits do not restrict the artist, on the contrary, they make the artist's art practice meaningful and elegant. What does it mean if the artist says "the game is over" after all these years of thinking about limitlessness within limits? Sevil Dolmacı Dubai, in her exhibition "Game Over. Let's Stop Now." exhibition, the viewers continue to think about the possible answers to this question.
Since Augustine, a theologian and a famous and influential philosopher in Western thought, in the Christian West, God is the author and master of nature. Nature, on the other hand, is conceived as the totality of existing beings, because the very fact that nature exists says, reveals and proves that there is a founder, maker and executor. The whole called nature is an ordered whole, obeys laws, and is in an order and repetition that shows man that there are rules. In the universe described by Geoffrey E.R. Lloyd, the famous historian of science, who sought to understand the concept we call nature, nature is autonomous, it has its own way of working, its own order, its own rules and boundaries, but these boundaries are vulnerable, especially today. Within nature's own domain, there is one thing that will never stop interfering with nature: human beings. On the one hand, man thinks about what we call nature, and on the other hand, he wonders whether he can reach a limit if he pushes nature and existence to its limit. In ancient Greece, Praxiteles, one of the most renowned sculptors of the 4th century BC, asked if man could be made of stone while shaping marble, whereas today's man asks if man could exist in the database of a computer. The questions asked in history had a meaning, a goal and a reason. As soon as the questions and the practices are emptied, "the game is over and so is the fun". Neither is the "joyful science" that these lead to.
Knowing that freedom is nature itself, Elvan Alpay does not offer truths, certainties, absolute truths. On the contrary, she leaves the viewer free and does not give answers. For this reason, Alpay's art is as free and in harmony with the functioning of nature itself, but when she says "The Game is Over. Let's stop." Is this the first time he has lost hope? Or, as William Butler Yeats, an Irish poet, playwright and one of the leading figures of 20th century literature, suggests in the poem below, are the doors of another world opening before us, a world we do not know, a world we have not even imagined?
In this storm that grows round and round / The hawk flies and does not hear what its owner says / Everything is collapsing, the pillars are all back / The earth is in turmoil [...] The good are devoid of all faith / But the bad have a mad passion in them, why? / It's obvious that a new secret is about to be revealed / Something we never knew / Maybe something new is knocking on our door / As soon as I say this, a new and giant image appears in front of me / Unlike anything / It's like the sun, it's like the sun, it gives life but also deserts / It's getting dark again / But a world that doesn't care about any of this is walking / Who knows where? / The game is over, but the game never ends.
