FRAC Champagne-Ardenne

Özgür Kar, Nocturne
Exhibition from January 31st to March 31st, 2024

Exhibition opening on Tuesday January 30th from 6 p.m.
To mark the opening of FARaway - Festival des arts à Reims

In the shadows of the Nocturne exhibition, insects swirl around a fallen tree, while a larger-than-life skeleton invites us to remain silent. Recalling the tradition of the vanities and Memento Mori, Özgür Kar’s exhibition invites us to remember the small pleasures that life has to offer, if only we pay attention: a morning mist, the infinity of the sky, a beating heart, birdsong… An ode to life proclaimed by Death, surrounded by uprooted trees.

In the animated videos by artist Özgür Kar, bodies and skeletons contort themselves within the narrow confines of human-sized flat screens. Sharing their existential questions with each other and with the audience, humming song lyrics or muttering slogans, these characters appear as magnifying mirrors of our realities. Their solitude, doubts and anxieties portray a collective distress that is struggling to find a way out.

Let’s agree to agree with me
Echoing this exhibition, the FRAC is also presenting a work by Özgür Kar that entered its collection in 2020, Let’s agree to agree with me (2019), on view throughout the festival at La Comédie - CDN de Reims. Let’s agree to agree with me is an animated video in which two characters confront each other in the restricted and constrained setting of a television screen, the format of which evokes that of our mobile phones. Repeating in turn “Let’s agree to agree with me”, this living painting stages an impossible dialogue that repeats itself ad infinitum.