Work in Progress

Emre Hüner’s solo exhibition [ELEKTROİZOLASYON]: Unknown Parameter Extro-Record (25.03–31.12.2021) brought together works shaped around a semi-fictional script through aesthetic gestures such as recording, documenting, citing, moulding and duplicating. In the exhibition curated by Aslı Seven, the sculptures, installations, photo-etchings, silkscreen prints, film and texts reflected a performative production process that relies on improvisation and moves across media. While forms referencing the closed-world architectures of the factory, laboratory, film-set, and settlement called out for a sterile and science-fictional estrangement, the black and white film sequences, sound elements dispersed through the space, and sculptures carried the subterranean murmurs, familiar archetypes and residual bodies of the museum building and the urban texture surrounding it into the space.

The film [ELEKTROİZOLASYON], realised by Hüner in the context of this exhibition, which consisted entirely of new productions, explores the thresholds between fiction, performance documentation, and documentary. The sequences, in which actors assume multiple characters from a script, at times turning to improvisation and at times interacting with real situations and people, traverse locations such as factories, shipyards, scrapyards, Arter’s basement levels, galleries and roof, as well as mannequin workshops, electronics and car repair shops, a natural history collection, and the Byzantine ruins surrounding the city. The narrative interweaves personal anecdotes drawn from archival photographs, fictional stories of night walks, lists of electrical and electronic terms, and real and fictional news headlines, seeping fragments from the city’s improvisation-based, makeshift industrial history. Revisiting the film’s edit, Hüner produced a second version, presented at the Taiwan National Museum of Fine Arts during the 9th Asia Art Biennial (November 2024–March 2025) and at the 16th Sharjah Biennial (February–June 2025). The iteration featured in Work in Progress is also this new 88-minute version, which introduces a subtle shift from the five-and-a-half-hour version shown at Arter in 2021 through the incorporation of animated elements.

Presented for the first time at the entrance of Juggernaut (04.09–03.10.2009), Hüner’s debut solo exhibition held at Rodeo Gallery in Istanbul, Untitled Aggressive Mimetic was supported by Arter and later added to the institution’s collection. Positioned both as a physical barrier and a symbol of humanity’s attempt to control nature, the work formed part of an exhibition exploring infinite machines, abandoned structures, and utopian cities incapable of fulfilling their functions. Presented alongside smaller-scale variations in different colours, spread throughout the space in Hüner’s 2021 solo exhibition at Arter, the sculpture alludes to modern coastal engineering and zoological taxonomy on a shared plane. Referencing the concrete design units of breakwaters developed against the destructive force of waves, the work signals a shared evolutionary history in which industrial design and biological processes intersect and transform one another through reciprocal mimicry. With its title referring to aggressive mimicry, in which one species copies the appearance or behaviour of another, Untitled Aggressive Mimetic brings the evolutionary timescale of tidal zones and a continuously reconfigured sense of space into the gallery.