Koray Ariş: The Skin We Live In

The Skin We Live In brings together in a site-specific arrangement Koray Ariş’s works from different periods and series, as well as objects and materials documenting the production processes in his studio. The exhibition provides a comprehensive look into the artist’s six-decade-long sculptural practice through themes of figure, skin, sound, movement and balance that are pivotal in his oeuvre. The approximatively 300 works and objects on display embody a communal territory where the age-old distinctions between sculpture, object and body dissolve, and where sculpture takes on a carnal dimension.

The Skin We Live In draws from the ties Koray Ariş has continuously forged between art, life, and nature in his studio in Çatalca (Istanbul) where he has been working since 1982. Embracing the intricacy of this space and the proximities it fosters among various forms and objects, the exhibition traces Ariş’s distinctive contributions to sculpture by means of materials such as wood, metal, found objects, and particularly leather. The non-chronological trajectory conceived by Selen Ansen establishes new connections by creating a dialogue between the artist’s sculptures which are reminiscent of bodily forms and inspired by nature, and his series incorporating sound and movement. Drawing attention to Ariş’s sensual approach to sculpture and his devotion to matter through the traces his hands relentlessly leave on surfaces, the exhibition embodies a realm where the natural and the artificial intertwine, various processes converge, materials merge, and forms evolve. The early figurative sculptures and busts, the abstract heads, the faces becoming animal / stone, the stones becoming bone, the bodies becoming trees / shells, the reliefs transforming into torsos / backs, all these forms shedding figuration prompt us to depart from the conventional definitions of the object we call “sculpture” and to consider anew the act of sculpting.