Özgür Kar

Blaise Adilon

Venue

URDLA Villeurbannne

Metropolitan area

Born 1992 in Ankara, Turkey.
Lives and works in Amsterdam, Netherlands.

In his black-and-white animated sculptures, Özgür Kar reflects on the idea of flatness, which refers both to the flat surface of traditional objects and to intellectual monotony. Death with Clarinet and Death with the Little Bell are inspired by popular representations of the late Middle Ages in Europe, especially “danse macabre” from medieval manuscripts, which depict skeletons dancing and playing folk instruments in ossuaries. Here, the characters are squeezed into the proportions of a flat screen, and death-anxiety churns in an eternal loop. These sculptures, developed during the global pandemic in 2021, offer a cheery response to the unsettling, worrisome state of our world, and invite the public to take a moment to reflect on the finite nature of our existence.