In the midst of the epidemic, when many artists saw their lives turned upside down, zge decided to rent a studio in Topçu Campo de Ourique. The Turkish plastic artist recently emigrated to the Portuguese capital and needed a place to store his materials and work. But it did not stop there: using the street window, he began asking artists from all over the world to send their works by mail, to the next milestone, and then he showed them behind a mirror.
Now, in the HyperCube project space, Ozgin’s work has begun to work alongside some of these works, as he explains, “out of the box” for an exhibition that mixes styles, media and nationalism. Sitting in a whitewashed studio in Rua Almeida e Sousa, the artist says, “This is a continuation of my work. I have always loved working in public places and collaborating with people.”
The name of the place is also not prominent. “The hypercube is a geometric shape – it’s a cube in four dimensions”, a blink of an eye for his love of architecture and history, but a vision that “brings together many artists in one place”. “It’s not an art gallery, it’s an art space where everyone is welcome and can propose projects.” The only condition is that they are willing to share space and they are attracted to different fields – signs, math, digital art, experimental art and so on.
Zge wants to experiment and create “different products using different techniques” according to the time and place where she lives. In Istanbul, for example, most of his works were “inspired by architecture and the history of the city through which many civilizations passed.”
Born in 1987 in Kirklerley, Turkey, to a family with no connection to the arts, Oz began studying science, but when you lived in Istanbul – after high school – he was “you have to be an artist. We have no choice. It’s an energetic and inspiring city.” Even today, “this is my first love”.
The idea of leaving Turkey came to him after he went to Germany to study for a master’s degree at the Burg Giebchischenstein Kunsthochschule Halle near Berlin. From there she moved to England, where she lived with her British boyfriend for a few months. As a table was split between Berlin, London and Istanbul, he decided he wanted to find a place where he could focus on his work – “you don’t need two jobs to live like you do in London”. Eager for life in the big cities, but eager to escape the stagnant prices of some of the big capitals, he chose Lisbon two and a half years ago.
Why Lisbon? “Because it’s very similar to Istanbul [risos]Here Özge guarantees that he feels “culturally comfortable”, highlighting the similarities between the citizens of Lisbon and Istanbul. “People are not individuals like they are in Northern Europe, they are very tolerant,” he insists, “everything is here in Lisbon.” It has a human dimension. “
Although he usually spends three months of the year in Istanbul, today he lives in Portugal. After all, Portugal and Turkey are two cities with many similarities in history – “both once great empires” but today they are “communities that think things are more important than money”.
Portugal, of course, once promoted கலzge’s art. For example, the Terrania installation pays homage to the earth and the earth object. “In big cities you can’t see the soil, the plants, the nature,” the artist explains, enjoying living in an apartment where you can see the land through the window. As for Terrania, Alcarve did not hesitate to collaborate with Portuguese potters from the Allendez and the Setubal area and was alert to the need to protect the planet and its environment.
Despite his first choice of science, Osage guarantees that he always felt like an artist. At the age of 5, he began to study music and played many instruments. But he turned to fine arts. “I do not do exactly what artists think. I want to create my own world, but above all I want to create a vision,” he explains, surrounded by works ranging from pottery to drawing or painting. If it weren’t for Govt, it wouldn’t have gone digital. “I wanted to work outside instead of sitting at the computer,” she says, but this epidemic made her understand the importance of communicating with people through virtual reality.
It was at that time that the idea of the HyperCube appeared – it was “an incubator of new ideas and new artists, sharing and solidarity”. Pointing to the corner of the studio, zge explains that in the work of Ayumi Adachi’s Setsuna, it came in a vacuum package by mail from Japan during the plague, and when he opened it, it expanded. “I felt that artists should look at their work, even outside their countries, especially when you can not travel,” he says. This is how the Post Box Exhibitions came to be, in which works from the prison window jumped into the studio. The same is true of the works of the German Tobias Becker or the Portuguese Susanna Morera. But the door is still open for more artists.
