HFKD is proud to present the first major institutional solo exhibition of Aia Sofia Coverley Turan.
In the exhibition To be a place that has no center, Turan starts from a Danish-Kurdish cultural history and her own origins in it. She makes use of classic materials such as bronze, plaster and copper and combines these with textiles, plastic and paper in a series of sculptures about the small ecstasies of everyday life. Through the materials and the sculptures, she creates stories of intimacy, grief and pride – what does the loss of a culture and the attempt to maintain it across national borders and over time entail?
Turan and HFKD have published a catalog for the exhibition. In an excerpt from the exhibition text written by artist colleague Anna Stahn, it says:
“The clothes hang casually on the door after a long day, a dress stands up like a person; a child or a young woman. The living dresses that recur in several places in the exhibition are wet, dripping fabric bodies; bodies without a center, without a boundary, bodies that carry themselves. They are about the tired and devoted body. The body between places, in a state of diaspora. The body between the inner and the outer world, the private and the public body.”
In To be a place that has no center, Turan’s thoughts are made visible in tea towels, wrung-out cloths and dresses – soft textiles, stiffened and draped as on classical sculptures of heroic male figures, but here they are traces of a woman and of domestic everyday life; in a series of dioramas or TV screens from which homely scenes are portrayed – the TV makes it possible to keep in touch across national borders, and you share from a distance terrible news and new episodes of an endless soap opera; in a relief that runs through the exhibition, depicting workers in constant motion, grinding away to make ends meet.
Turan depicts everyday scenarios and identity complexes with her sculptural elements. She is concerned with the wordless narrative and alternative methods of communicating across languages; in the correspondence between both light and heavy materials, the sketched and the cast, she works on a new form of materialized storytelling – a sensitive form of communication that revolves around fragmented memories of a Danish-Kurdish origin, of transgenerational trauma and social patterns.
Aia Sofia Coverley Turan (1994, DK) graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2019. She has exhibited at Den Frie, Simian, Galleri Tom Christoffersen, Four Boxes, Arcway Nightlands Connector and KØS Museum for art in the public space, among others.
Aia Sofia Coverley Turan’s works are part of the Danish Arts Foundation’s and Copenhagen Municipality’s collection.
The exhibition is kindly supported by Danish Arts Foundation, The Danish Art Workshops, Grosserer L.F. Foghts Fond, Holstebro Municipality, Færch Foundation, Det Obelske Familiefond and 15. Juni Fonden.
