BURHAN KUM: CRIME SCENE – DO NOT CROSS (RETROSPECTIVE 2022-2002)
Some images from the "BURHAN KUM: CRIME SCENE – DO NOT CROSS (RETROSPECTIVE 2022-2002)" exhibition
Curated by Ebru Beyza
Art is a journey with no initial point or an end. The artist does not know when he embarked
on this path, nor does he know his goal or when his journey will end. Therefore, it is useful to stop
once in a while and look back on the works that has been produced in a certain period. This activity,
which displays the artist’s development of his oeuvre in a limited period, exposes this development to
the evaluation of the audience but also allows him to question his own production.
Burhan Kum, who started executing art with the copies of drawings he made by looking at the
Alphabet book of his two years older brother, has been producing art "consciously" since 1989, the
year he graduated from the academy. He has been exhibiting his works uninterruptedly since 1992.
Kum decided to start the retrospective with the Manavgat Postcards series, exhibited in 2002 (and he
was sued for) which he sees, as the first the first moves to create his own narrative language. These
paintings are the first critical attitude that Kum developed against the social perception that the
dominating power is trying to construct through images. The Postcards series is also the beacon of
the issue of “the social meaning of images and their function in historiography”, which will be the
main sentence of all his subsequent exhibitions.
In the nine solo exhibitions he opened in the following twenty years, Kum preferred to use the
visual language he borrowed from social use, either directly or by transforming it. His aim in doing this
is to fight back the dominant power with his own weapon. By this attitude, the artist also aimed to
emphasize the artificiality of the visual language imposed on society. He pondered for a long time,
especially on the "pixel" cloud, which started to be built in the 21st century with the development of
digital technologies and envelops the whole world. The digital world's penetration into every pocket
and the rapid flow of information through images into the brain is the main reason why Burhan Kum
approaches this technology with suspicion. The artist turned his suspicions on the sensitive nerve
endings of society such as sexuality, pornography, religion, official discourse and politics, and inverted
the digital images that represent these structures that aim to create a system of thought. The fact
that the canvases that have emerged in the last twenty years have turned into a crime scene is the
natural result of such an inversion.
