Officine dell’Immagine in Milan will be hosting the first solo exhibition in Italy by Servet Kocyigit

From 27 November 2014 to 7 February 2015, Officine dell’Immagine in Milan will be hosting the first solo exhibition in Italy by Servet Kocyigit (Kaman, 1971), one of the most interesting contemporary Turkish artists.
Curated by Silvia Cirelli, the exhibition, titled Truth Serum, presents a selection of works, including photographs, installations and a video, never before exhibited in Italy, able to interpret Kocyigit's most recent artistic career, accentuating the sarcastic and provocative slant.

Servet Kocyigit's current expressive research captures the intimate mapping of a country, Turkey, which for several decades has been precariously balanced between East and West, between the secular and Islamic states, in an unending dispute between the desire for modernisation and the preservation of tradition.
This dialectic is explored with great originality, translating the ambivalence of his own nation and especially shifting the focus towards a more collective dimension, which skilfully evokes the unreliability of the truth and its misleading alteration.
These stylistic features have certainly been influenced by his personal experience. We must not forget, in fact, that his generation grew up after the 1980 coup, when increasingly strict censorship forced people to believe in an undisputed and above all imposed truth.
The precariousness of the truth as well as its comparison with the concept of freedom play a major role in his poetic synthesis. “It was through art itself - Kocyigit has stated - that I really understood what freedom was.”

The Milan exhibition opens with the Truth series from 2011: three large-format photographs in which the artist plays on the theme of power, fame and the deceptive transience of things. A group of menacing journalists and cameramen are seen endlessly spying on an unspecified celebrity, who is never seen and about whom we know nothing. It is the almost fierce ambiguity of the craving for a scandal that becomes more important than the news itself.

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