RePlay
November 7, 2024 – January 7 2025
Ilknur Demirkoparan, Naomi Middelmann, Keoni K. Wright
Curated by: Vuslat D. Katsanis
The Arts Center Corvallis
Reception and Curator’s Talk: November 7, 5:30-7:00pm
700 SW Madison Avenue, Corvallis, OR, 97333
MinEastry of Postcollapse Art and Culture (MPAC), in association with The Arts Center in Corvallis, presents RePlay, an international contemporary art exhibition featuring work by Ilknur Demirkoparan, Naomi Middelmann, and Keoni K. Wright.
RePlay brings together three contemporary artists working across Suriname, Switzerland and Türkiye with work that recalls and reinterprets historically complex material in critically innovative ways. As the third installment of MPAC’s 2023 exhibition series, Play and Interplay, which opened in Zurich during the Zurich Art Weekend, RePlay at The Arts Center in Corvallis explores themes of repetition and reinterpretation to challenge the residual afterimages of colonialist representative traditions. From Ilknur Demirkoparan’s reinterpretation of Orientalist iconography and its crossovers in current artificial intelligence imaging technology for depicting Turkish characters, to Naomi Middelmann’s reassemblage of private family letters written in German during the rise of European antisemitism, to Keoni K. Wright’s looping of Afro-Caribbean mysticism and Surinamese oral narrative in video art form, each of the works on display replay aspects of lasting memories to rethink contemporary art critical discourse.
Ilknur Demirkoparan draws from the interplay of identity, migration, and the ethnographic spectacle to confront the enduring Eurocentric representative tropes surrounding the depiction of Turkish characters in art and cultural history. Aligned with the global movement to decolonize exhibition practices, Demirkoparan presents several remakes from her earlier artistic practice. Each work is in dialogue with additional intertextual references. “Turkish Delight in Three Takes” (2024) is a remake of her 2008 work titled Sometimes Mr. Metzel, A Candy Is Just A Candy, which itself responds to the German artist Olaf Metzel’s 2007 sculpture of a nude woman titled Turkish Delight. In her remake of the Fantastic Turks: The Necessary Retrieve Edition (2024), Demirkoparan engages contemporary AI imaging technology to depict Turkish stock characters for a trading card series, thereby exposing the lasting influence of the Orientalist gaze in shaping data output. Finally, in her updated Branded (2024), Demirkoparan revisits the era of post 9-11 Islamophobia in the USA and the branding of identities. Altogether, the artist displays the semiotics of identity and alterity to grapple with the lingering afterimages of the colonial gaze.
Naomi Middelmann’s work explores the difficulty of remembering through a variety of media including found objects, textile installations, drawing, and painting. Her works on display involve the act of recollecting and reassembling the landscapes of memories sewn across space and time. In Wanderings of My Mind (2024) Middelmann draws maps of fictional places to express the immigrant experience of territorial loss and spatial disorientation. In Family History (2023), she transcribes the entirety of a book written in German by her Grandfather which traces her family lineage between 1412-1986, while marking tumultuous events both private and political. Against the background of the peak of antisemitism in Europe, Middelmann traces her own family’s emigration journey across five continents. Middelmann’s Territory Narratives series (2024) reassembles vintage maps of Europe, Africa and the Americas, from which she recreates cities and towns and carves out new roadways. Challenging the scientific objectivism of maps, Middelmann’s series reveals the fragmentation of place through the permeating contexts of migration and loss. In a bizarre Sisyphean act of writing words in a language which one cannot read, or reconstructing roadways which one cannot ever cross, Middelmann’s works on memory hover in the interstitial space between knowing and feeling, all the while envisioning critically playful challenges against a depersonalized version of objective history.
Keoni K. Wright’s documentary style of experimental filmmaking combines curiosity with consideration to hear the stories from the Amazonian-Caribbean nation of Suriname, which has been his home since 2017. Mixing elements of the documentary style with avant-garde street sensibility, Wright’s short films extend what Trinh T. Minh-ha famously described as the ethics of “speaking nearby.” That is to say, rather than speaking for or explaining away the subjects of his films from the outside, Wright’s films enter into the rich cultural spaces of this tiny postcolonial nation to humbly hear, unfold, and learn from the diverse voices of people telling their stories on their own terms. From the dangerous but joyful journey of a group of conservationists paddling across Suriname’s tropical rivers in search of the world’s largest snake in Aboma! Aboma! (2023) to the various Afro-Carribbean dance traditions performed by powerful young women in ReleaseD (2020), to the myth of the healing powers of the legendary anaconda hospitals in the dialogue exchanged between the patient and the caretaker in Intake (2024), Wright’s films celebrate their storytellers while decentering the ethno-documentarian gaze. Wright’s playful narrative and generosity of close-listening encourage collaborative exchange between the subjects of his films and their viewers.
Artist Bios (in alphabetical order)
Iknur Demirkoparan is a Turkish-American artist whose research-based interdisciplinary practice spans painting, installation, sculpture, digital media, and creative programming to explore identity and memory through image-making, dissemination, and repetition. She has performed and exhibited her work at the Bucharest Biennale 11, ZHdK OnCurating in Zurich, Mark Borghi Fine Art in New York, 7th Berlin Biennial Art Wiki Project, Highways Performance Space and Gallery in Los Angeles, and FAR Bazaar 2017. Her writing appears in ASAP/j, FLAT Magazine, and Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture. She has an MFA in Art from California Institute of the Arts and a BA in Art from the University of California, Riverside. Her recent residencies include the Future Memory Lab in Paraguay at Migliorisi Foundation x ProHelvetia, and ChaNorth, New York. She is the recipient of fellowship awards from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Max H. Gluck Foundation. Demirkoparan is also the founding director of the MinEastry of Postcollapse Art and Culture. She currently lives and works in Zurich, Switzerland.
Naomi Middelmann is a multimedia artist known for using found objects, family artifacts, and light or air sketches on gauzy canvases and skin-like surfaces to explore the question of memory. Born in Switzerland, Middelmann moved to New York when she was 16. After earning a degree in Creative Writing and International Relations from Johns Hopkins University, she worked in publishing. She chose to return to Europe and earned a postgraduate degree in visual arts from the Visual Art School in Basel in 2009. Her work and process have been shown in over 70 solo and group shows, museums, galleries and art fairs in Europe, USA, and Switzerland. Her art is featured in public and major private collections in Switzerland, Europe, Australia, Canada, Israel, Japan and the USA.
Keoni K. Wright is an experimental filmmaker and documentarian whose work primarily focuses on the Amazonian-Caribbean nation of Suriname. From intimate portraits of liberation to mystical encounters with anacondas and biopics of civil war heroes, Wright’s films explore a wide range of subjects. His work has been screened on five continents and featured as an official selection in sixteen international film festivals, including the Los Angeles Pan African Film Festival, the Toronto Black Film Festival, the Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival, and the Green Screen Environmental Film Festival. Additionally, his experimental films have appeared in exhibitions across Portland, Los Angeles, Arima, and Zurich. Wright was nominated for Virginia Tech University’s Cinematic Arts Awards for Decolonizing Media in 2020 and was the inaugural recipient of the For Common Good Platform Artist Residency award in Arima, Trinidad. A testicular cancer survivor, Wright lives and works in Suriname.
About the Curator:
Vuslat D. Katsanis is an academic, curator, and writer working across the USA and Europe. Her research focuses on migration narratives and visual culture since 1989. She is the cofounding director of the MinEastry of Postcollapse Art and Culture, and the 2025 NEH Visiting Professor in the Department of Literature, Media, and Writing at Hartwick College.
About The Corvallis Arts Center:
The Corvallis Arts Center is a vibrant community hub dedicated to promoting and supporting the arts in Corvallis, Oregon. Founded in 1961, the center offers a range of visual and performing arts programs, workshops, and exhibitions, fostering creativity and collaboration among local and international artists and residents. Through its commitment to accessibility and inclusivity, the center enriches the cultural landscape of the community, providing opportunities for artistic expression and engagement for all.
