Bozlu Art Project continues its themed group exhibitions held every summer with the exhibition titled "Mad World" curated by Oğuz Erten from 28th June to 25th August this year.
It is stated in Erasmus's vintage work titled "Praise of Folly" that we come to realize that we have a good head on our shoulders due to the existence of the mad persons. Although today's civilization, which is the utopia of the past that mankind has revealed in a thousand years, is built on reason, it is talked about the fact that such civilization has cracked in many ways today. Almost everyone from the bottom to the top tier of society is acting as if they want to prove that they are madder than each other. These problems, growing like topsy, bring a question to mind; what if the society goes mad?! This feeling, increasing its weight and intensity with each passing day, ceases to be third page news and is now spreading among all the news and between the lines that are busy on the agenda and corresponds to cases of madness that we witnessed during the day. The chain of events, with which we contact in the daily life, and which are too weird to be true, however, which become ordinary to the extent that they have reoccurred, do not differ on the basis of those running the world. The world is experiencing a loss of balance, ranging from starting and ending the war through Twitter to performing nuclear missile trials, and from cyber warfare to petrol battles, and from legitimizing the exploitation of the nature and man to firing the racism. In the past, while the kings, emperors and rulers had clowns and mad persons, the world makes us think if it evolves to more catholic regimes by getting into a delirium during these days.
Even though Erasmus foresaw what we have lived today, through his works hundreds of years ago, the world seems far away from seeing the point to which it has evolved: “The humans, advancing by means of their mind, start to take the heavy stones on their back slowly under the guidance of the formal mind, to which they cause, however, with respect to which they have lost the control, and finally, they often forget to open a small window towards the dungeon that they have built.”[1] I wonder whether those that we have experienced lastly are the dungeon days of the civilization built by the mankind.
Since we are talking about the madness of society, the crazy behaviors, which are ignored and welcomed, and which will not be taken seriously, are no longer valid for our new age! We must think, and madly.
In the "Mad World" exhibition, curated by Oğuz Erten at Bozlu Art Project Nişantaşı gallery from June 28 to August 25, 2018, Burcu Aksoy, Ali Alışır, İlgen Arzık, Sinan Demirtaş, Server Demirtaş, Evren Erol, Murat Germen, Tülay İçöz, Çağatay Odabaş, Meliha Sözeri, Gamze Taşdan ve Semih Zeki's works, which focus on the today and the future, are exhibited.
[1] Desiderius Erasmus; Delilige Ovgu, Istanbul 2007, page 9.