Merdiven Art Space
Skip to main content
  • Menu
  • Home
  • Exhibitions
  • Blog
  • Publications
  • Artists
  • Press
  • Video
  • Events
  • Team
  • Contact
  • EN
  • TR
Instagram, opens in a new tab.
Instagram, opens in a new tab.
Menu
  • EN
  • TR

Middle East Dreamin': Orta Doğu Pavyonu

Past exhibition
12 January 2018 - 24 February 2019
  • Installation Views
  • Press release
Middle East Dreamin', Orta Doğu Pavyonu

“MIDDLE EAST DREAMIN’”
ORTADOĞU

12.01.2018 – 24.02.2018

 

 

Merdiven Art Space is proud to announce the artist duo, ORTADOĞU’s very first solo exhibition in İstanbul, as a part of its embracing programme. The show titled “Middle East Dreamin’” which has been designed as a site-specific installation, meets the viewers between the dates of January 12-February 24, 2018. Through their works being shaped from autobiographic narratives, the duo producing in a wide range of disciplines such as painting, sculpture, video, installation, comics, textile; merge their approach that highly inspired from irony and symbolism with a surrealistic fiction. 

 

In accordance with their multi-disciplinary formation, improving their artistic practice on a flexible ground, ORTADOĞU continues to work in İzmir.  After their previous show named “Arabesque Fantasia” which was held at K2 Contemporary Art Center last year, the duo takes their freshest works’ inspiration from a ‘neverland’ which has crashed into the harsh side of the chaos and gone back to square one. In this exhibition, ORTADOĞU as the youth of a society which try to be adapted to Post-Modernism as far as the geographical and socio-cultural circumstances allow; verbalizes the mental and emotional dilemmas being derived from ‘The Age of Knowledge’ that we are in. “Middle East Dreamin’” describes the surreal living room of a messiah/mahdi coming from the New World, as a simulated garden of eden. Crossing the borders of Kitsch through the familiar objects and expressions about the Middle East geography, ORTADOĞU reveals the most exaggerated form of the cultural imperialism by picturing the portrait of this fictional leader. 

 

“Middle East Dreamin’” invites the viewer to explore the sides of his own visual and audial tastes tending to deform by a trip towards the inner world of this persona who mirrors the degenerated world/social order. Presenting the awry synthesis that has arised in the process of enforced orientation of old and new/East and West via future simulation, ORTADOĞU calls out to the artlovers with their own poetic manner: 

 

“Help yourself into our burned and razed kingdom made from the “ash” in the midst of the frozen century’s disgraceful sins! You may check in here and there. 

While the pointed teeth of your disbelief and the envious eyes of your lovelessness have been shredding the entire senses and the plain but vital things; you have pleased yourself. When the agony of the luscious freedom surrounded your flesh from top to toe, it has started to vellicate thru the hemlock poisoning. So whenever you have not endured the pain of your burning skin then only then you have cursed, you have torn your hair out; yet no avail.

The time has come, guys; time for awaking...

Here rises the Age of the Moral Renaissance!”

 

 

“Middle East Dreamin’”  is on display from Tuesday to Saturday between 11:00 - 18:00.

Download Press Release

Related artist

  • Orta Doğu Pavyonu

Back to exhibitions
Manage cookies
Copyright © 2025 Merdiven Art Space
Site by Artlogic
Instagram, opens in a new tab.
Twitter-x, opens in a new tab.
Youtube, opens in a new tab.
LinkedIn, opens in a new tab.
Send an email
Join the mailing list

This website uses cookies
This site uses cookies to help make it more useful to you. Please contact us to find out more about our Cookie Policy.

Manage cookies
Accept

Cookie preferences

Sitemizin kullanmasına izin verdiğiniz çerez kategorilerini işaretleyin.

Cookie options
Required for the website to function and cannot be disabled.
Improve your experience on the website by storing choices you make about how it should function.
Allow us to collect anonymous usage data in order to improve the experience on our website.
Allow us to identify our visitors so that we can offer personalised, targeted marketing.
Save preferences