The Artist’s Eye, The Historian’s Gaze

Ottoman Pavilions at World's Fairs
CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE

Butler Library, Butler Library, 535 W. 114 St., New York, NY 10027 Rooms 211 and 602, New York

‘The Pavilion’ is a mural by Baris Gokturk (MFA, 2020) installed in Butler Library Rooms 211 and 602 and based on Prof. Zeynep Celik’s book Displaying the Orient: Architecture of Islam at Nineteenth-Century World’s Fairs. ‘The Pavilion’ recomposes and reimagines a kaleidoscopic space assembled by fragments of the different displays Ottoman Empire chose to represent itself over the course of international expositions in the nineteenth century from Chicago to Paris. The piece works images and documentation from Ottoman Pavilions from these World Fairs into speculative collages that combine real with imagined inventory of architecture, objects and artefacts rooted in the orientalist expectations of both the exhibitor (Ottomans) and the audience (The Westerner).

Baris Gokturk is a Turkish artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. He is currently an MFA candidate in sculpture at Columbia University. He also holds an MFA in painting from Hunter College and currently teaches at John Hopkins University and Pace University. He has shown his work internationally in the US, Germany, Spain, France, Korea, Turkey and Puerto Rico. Recent exhibitions include Pera Museum in Istanbul and Spring-Break Art Show in New York. Gokturk recently was an ApexArt fellow in Seoul, Korea, artist-in-resident at YADDO, LMCC, Millay Colony and a participant in SOMA Mexico as well as Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine.