September 29 - October 23, 2016

 

Amos Eno Gallery is pleased to present 20 Letters, a solo exhibition featuring new work by Tulu Bayar on view  through October 23. An opening reception will be held on Friday, September 30, 7- 9 PM at the gallery’s new location at 56 Bogart Street in Brooklyn, NY.

 

Representing what is interwoven and concealed in their daily lives, 20 Letters is a visual manifestation of the short essays written by 20 women about the hardships that they face due to their Muslim identity. For this work, progressive voices of gay, straight, black, white and brown Muslim women from the United States put their personal stories to paper.

 

In 20 Letters, a sequence of 20 small mixed-media work meticulously created out of photographic film, maple board and resin draw upon Bayar’s exploration of text and calligraphic abstraction. The meditative repetition of the photographic film forms responds to the Islamic tradition of the spirituality of text as well as Islamic manuscript painting. This repetition also lends an almost performative aspect to the works, while the intimate size creates the feeling of an intensely personal interaction with the work.

 

Bayar photographed and recorded these stories on black and white photographic film then laid them out on maple boards in patterns reminiscent of Ebru, the Turkish marbling technique developed in 15th century, and Middle Eastern calligraphy. Scrolled films half hide, half reveal these women’s stories by keeping them anonymous, echoing their state of mind between confrontation and silence. In this body of work, Bayar creates a poetic dialog between the traditional and the experimental, embracing a conscious nod to the past while employing contemporary trends of art for social change.

 

Bayar has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions at museums and galleries in the US as well as in Germany, Denmark, UK, France, Colombia, Turkey and China. She has received funding from Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, Ténot Foundation, artist-in residency grants from Camac Centre d'Art in France and the Center for Photography at Woodstock funded by the Andy Warhol Foundation as well as William Sackett Fellowship through Virginia Center for Creative Arts. Bayar teaches photography and multi-media courses at Bucknell University.  20 Letters is her fourth solo exhibition with Amos Eno Gallery.

 

This exhibition is made possible by a grant from the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity, and Gender at Bucknell University.