Finding the Edge
2017
Installation with oak shelves, hand-bound books, honeycomb, fern fossils, globes, ferns, collectible cards, cicada sounds, animation of tectonic shift, postcards, fern frond, Canadian poet Anne Carson’s book Eros: The Bittersweet (1983), beehive frame, wasp nest, bee in honey jar, framed taste bud diagrams (sweet and bitter) printed on OH film, two videos in an endless loop, apples, postal stamp, wax mould of a tongue, shungite and knucklebone
300 x 600 x 209 cm in seven units
Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Nordenhake Stockholm/Berlin
Meriç Algün (1983) was born in Istanbul, Turkey and currently lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden. The contrasting differences in the make-up of these two cities, particularly socially and politically, as well as her movement between the two, play key roles in her practice. Permeating a variety of media, Algün’s work is conceptual, formal and austere in appearance, and her approach is meticulous, method-driven and taxonomical. She often identifies particular contexts and then works within set parameters rooted in order and control to reveal and punctuate relations between elements of complex structures. Her multifaceted work concentrates on issues of identity, borders, bureaucracy, language and mobility through appropriated and ‘ready-made’ texts, dictionaries and archives.
Finding the Edge is a freestanding shelving structure that is cut into seven units on site. The work draws parallels between the separation of the continents and the origins of human desire. The measurements of each unit correspond proportionally to the surface area of each continent, whilst the gaps between the rows of shelves are correlated with the surface area of the oceans. In their self-contained logic, the shelves hold a variety of objects – ranging from plants and animal fossils to globes, hand-made books, videos and sculptures – that intertwine notions of geological and human boundaries and connections.
mericalgun.com