TANZER ARIĞ

Tanzer Arığ was born in 1975 in Ankara. He graduated from the Sculpture Department of Hacettepe University, Faculty of Fine Arts, in 2000, and the following year began his master’s studies at the same institution. He started working as a research assistant in 2002 and received his Proficiency in Art degree in 2015. He is currently working at the same institution as an Assistant Professor (Dr. Öğretim Üyesi).

 

As a flâneur, Tanzer Arığ bears witness to our present day and our surroundings, wandering through the architectural corners of destruction and creativity. While Gaston Bachelard approached interior spaces such as houses, buildings, attics, and cellars as sites of poetics and literary imagination, aiming to humanize and unify geographies and historical places, figures such as Lefebvre and David Harvey occupy the opposite end of this philological and philosophical spectrum, examining the meaning, cultural, political, and aesthetic dimensions of urban destruction and spatial transformation.

 

Tanzer Arığ engages with Bachelard’s poetic imagery alongside Harvey’s defense of memory-spaces, interpreting them in the form of visual notes. This exhibition proposes memory fields that respond to assaults on urban settlements targeted by capitalist speculation and to the displacement of the houses and apartment buildings of our childhoods. The artist also presents proposals for new houses, rooms, and spaces. These architectural forms transformed into sculptural shapes can be viewed both as notes recording our nostalgic experiences of passing structures and as the sharp observational critiques that artists produce in response to the destructive decisions of economic and political systems.

 

Having studied a political economy that understands progress not as a climate of destruction but as interconnected processes and buildings, the artist uses his architectural proposals to draw attention to new modes of thinking. In nearly every culture, a door represents a passage, a threshold, a boundary, and at times an uncertainty. Symbolically, it can signify an existential transition a moment when the individual sheds their current state and steps into a new experiential realm. The door, which can sometimes pull us away from our familiar world and into the depths of the unknown, also facilitates the formation of a subjective new experiential space. At the center of this experiential space lies the threshold, which metaphorically marks a charged symbolic moment: a space where we decide what is inside or outside, which side opens to the real world or the world of ideas, and where fears and desires must be confronted.