Exhibition
Hundreds of plaster ears with yellow livestock tags filled the window of Büyükdere35 and, for a month, made eye contact with everyone passing on the street.
Büyükdere35 — one of Doğuş Group's social investments in culture and the arts — hosted İrem Yüksekbilgili's 1wall exhibition 'Eye Contact' in collaboration with Sanata Bi Yer. The show was on view in İstanbul from 25 June to 28 July 2024.
The wall in the window was the largest-scale form of the artist's gesture of turning the ear tag — the livestock industry's marking device — into an art object by removing it from its purpose: hundreds of ears from 'The Legitimacy of Domination', row upon row, on a single surface. Works made with non-animal materials such as plant-based soap and imitation leather accompanied the show.
At the opening, visitors received numbered tickets echoing the yellow tags, and small jars prepared for the show; each visitor, with a number, took the place of a marked body.
Numbers and soap
In another part of the show, numbered soap blocks were lined up on a wooden shelf in front of a large black-and-white photographic print. Soap — a plant-based, non-animal material the artist favours in her practice — reads here both as body and as number.
In contrast, she believes that animals are individuals with intrinsic, not instrumental, value. She advocates for a more just and holistic way of life, instead of a system where the powerless are marginalized, their rights ignored, and even enslaved.