Nimet, the exhibition of Kıymet Daştan meets with the audience at PASAJ on 15-30 April 2021. The exhibition is centered around bread, the basic nutritional source, and is named after Nimet, the historical Ottoman Han where PASAJ is located. It consists of video installations, sculptures, drawings and objects.

 

The work of Kıymet Daştan which she started to shape years ago around Turkish bread so as to transform what bread, in its standard form, is associated with into physical forms, comes to life merged with the memory of the building and its surroundings. The artist defines the process as an important part of her work. Her artistic work in the exhibition draws attention to memory, the spirit of the material and the work of the human hand by means of memories and situates compelling journeys at the very center of the artist’s creative process via a poetic narrative.

 

In the exhibition based on the first cut she had in life, the artist makes us ponder over the question of value and hypocrisy which permeate our daily lives. Daştan proposes us to look at the wound opened by this incision while pointing out how we witness the events we are exposed to and how we position ourselves in the face of them.

 

In a 3-channel performance video called Hypocrisy (Riya), Dastan grabs a bread and throws it on the ground. Then she kisses it three times and puts it on her forehead, endlessly repeating this action. The artist divides the body according to its proportions and places it on screens at eye level, thus drawing attention to how separating the stages from each other changes the perception.

 

In her sculptural work called Tool (Alet), she places the bronze cast of the amorphous cut bakers make on the bread so that it can proportionally rise in a position where it can be held at hand.
While highlighting the wheat motif over the 10 kuruş she intervened in her work called "The Money That Falls on the Ground" (Yere Düşen Para), she establishes strong symbolic and contextual relations with soil in another work entitled "Vatan”.

 

By extension, she reconsiders the connection with bread during the pandemic and adds a new work named "Six Zero" (Altı Sıfır) in her installation. In times when Turkish Lira is being depreciated, the work draws attention to a detail that we tend to miss by means of taking a look at what replaced the zeros removed from Lira in 2005.

 

This project is supported by SAHA within the scope of the Sustainability Fund.

 

Kıymet Daştan (b. 1980, Istanbul), searching for sensual forms regarding the fragmented memory of the individual and the society among daily symbols that are readily overlooked, graduated from Mimar Sinan University for Fine Arts, Sculpture Department (2008). She then received an MA degree in design at Milan’s Domus Academy (2014) on a full scholarship. She received another master’s degree in 2021 at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, Sculpture Department. She recently completed Home Workspace Fellowship Program at Ashkal Alwan Fine Art Association in Beirut (2019). Dastan, having artworks exhibited in various exhibitions both in Turkey and abroad, continues to work in her atelier in Istanbul.