L'avancée Bahar Kocabey
L’Avancée is a hanging wall dedicated to emerging artists and a way of extending the exhibition space into the living space. During the year 21-22, the Pernod Ricard Foundation is partnering with the Ecole des Beaux-arts de Paris and the « exhibition professions » program. Every month, from October to July, a student is invited to take over the wall and to accompany his or her work with an exchange with the public.
Sixth episode of our collaboration with the Beaux-Arts de Paris, L’avancée presents for four weeks the work of Bahar Kocabey, a student at the studio of Marie-José Burky.
A student at the Beaux-Arts de Paris, in Marie-José Burki’s studio, Bahar Kocabey explores the plastic possibilities of the portrait and the motif through drawing, painting and ceramics. For the French artist of Kurdish origin, « everything begins with the drawing », a primitive gesture of a double exploration of the form and the formless. Playing with the ambiguities between motifs and « macules » according to the method prescribed by Alexander Cozens1, she then draws on narrative forms not circumscribed to an idea of self-portraiture reduced to a hermetic intimacy. A look at scenes of everyday life. « Hush hush hush, daddy sleeping » of a childish nursery rhyme, it is a deaf brutality that discreetly unfolds in the spirals of apple peelings methodically dried by a sleeping father, again and again.
Bahar Kocabey thus composes portraits-landscapes. With a gentle hospitality, ochre tones and warm colors dominate the compositions of the artist who articulates the worlds she inhabits simultaneously, while rehabilitating a violently silenced culture. According to the notion of « Kurdish subalternity » developed by Engin Sustam2, she thus draws the horizons of a political cultural identity, multiple and in relation.
1 Jean-Claude Lebensztejn, The Art of the Task: An Introduction to the New Method of Alexander Cozens, 1990.
2 Engin Sustam, Kurdish art and subalternity: the emergence of a space of subjective and creative production between violence and resistance in Turkey, 2016.
