After 40 years of exhibitions with more than 200 local and international artists, Maçka Art Gallery (MSG) bid farewell to art lovers five years ago, but now, with the joint decision of Rabia Çapa and her daughter Didem Çapa, to whom she handed on the gallery, it returns with a collaborative exhibition by artist and academic Serhat Kiraz and computer programmer and artist Hakan Gündüz, titled ‘Moment/An’. The exhibition will remain open at MSG from 16 November to 18 December, 2021.

Founded in 1976 by Rabia Çapa and her sister, Varlık Yalman Sadıkoğlu, who passed away in 1989, at a modern building on Mim Kemal Öke Street in the Maçka neighbourhood of Istanbul, Maçka Art Gallery (MSG) bid farewell to art lovers in 2016, 40 years after its foundation, following Rabia Çapa’s decision.

MSG was founded on an 80 m2 space, with contributions by Architect Mehmet Konuralp, winner of the Sinan Award, lighting designer Şazi Sirel and graphic designer and painter Mengü Ertel. Following the decision to end its activities, the gallery transferred its archive to the Vehbi Koç Foundation, and founder Rabia Çapa and art historian and critic Dr.Necmi Sönmez, for both archives and the general reader, edited a book titled ‘Görünmeyene Bakmak/Looking at the Invisible’, documenting the institution’s history of more than 200 exhibitions.

Now, five years after its closing, MSG, with the joint decision of Rabia Çapa and her daughter Didem Çapa, to whom she has handed on the gallery, once again takes its place on the art agenda with ‘Moment/An’, a collaborative exhibition by an artist who has contributed to the history of contemporary art in Turkey, academic Serhat Kiraz and computer programmer and artist Hakan Gündüz.

The works in the exhibition invite viewers to a vast experience regarding the concept of time, which is consolidated with the visual impact of the raw ceramic tiles measuring 10 x 10 cm used by Architect Konuralp and the characteristic interior and exterior design, thus transforming the institution into a physical and metaphysical graph-notebook.

With the Moment/An project, Kiraz and Gündüz combine physical, conceptual, acoustic, visual and personal interpretations of time, which render, via labour, awareness and property, the existence of humanity computable, obtainable, questionable and expendable via different disciplines. The duo consolidates and opens to discussion, on a conceptual and experiential platform, both the past, present and future within the scope pf the historical ‘moment’ and ‘space’ at MSG.

Formed of historical wall clocks, electronic cogwheel arrangements, sundials and digital and visual installations, ‘Moment/An’ gains its true dynamic with the inclusion of the viewer. Enriched with experience design and references to the history of the space, the virtual, psychological and sensory intervention added to space and time, both by Kiraz, who opened three solo exhibitions at 1984, 1993 and 2007 and by New Media designer Hakan Gündüz, renders and records this as a project with brand new dimensions.

AICA Turkey member and independent journalist, writer Evrim Altuğ also contributes with his reading of the exhibition titled, “‘Memento’graph - An Epistle of Keepsakes”.