Grim

For his first solo exhi­bi­tion in Belgium enti­tled GRIM, the young Turkish artist Özgür Kar is show­ing a new large scale video instal­la­tion in the base­ment space of Liebaert Projects. Kar’s works often fea­ture black and white ani­ma­tions of anthro­po­mor­phic char­ac­ters, trapped inside the con­fined frames of flat screens, deliv­er­ing con­tem­po­rary tales poised between desire, melan­choly, and lone­li­ness. In a dark, but humor­ous way Kar’s slow-mov­ing alter egos unfold an emo­tion­al com­plex­i­ty through their mono­logues. The artist draws his influ­ences from a vari­ety of gen­res, such as exper­i­men­tal the­atre, European and Turkish folk­lore, as well as 1990s MTV car­toons. Through his sto­ry­telling, Kar reflects on the cur­rent his­tor­i­cal peri­od of ongo­ing cri­sis and its effects on the human psyche.

For GRIM, the artist alludes to the iconog­ra­phy of death as depict­ed in European man­u­scripts dur­ing the plagues of the late Middle Ages. Upon enter­ing the space, the view­er is con­front­ed by a giant skele­ton lying supine, singing the final line from Shakespeare’s Hamlet; ​“Good night, / and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest”. Repeating end­less­ly, the line almost becomes a mantra, a lament for death, invit­ing the view­er to a moment of emo­tion­al con­tem­pla­tion on loss.

The artist designed a lim­it­ed edi­tion t‑shirt that is for sale dur­ing the exhi­bi­tion with the aim of sup­port­ing the Liebaert Projects’ program.

About Özgur Kar

Özgür Kar (b. 1992, Ankara, Turkey) lives and works in Amsterdam. He stud­ied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy and is cur­rent­ly artist in res­i­dence at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten (2019 – 2021). Recent solo exhi­bi­tions; MACABRE, Kunstverein Gartenhaus, Vienna (2021); A Decade of Submission, Édouard Montassut (2020); Exposed, instal­la­tion in pub­lic space at Europarådets plass, Oslo (2019); A New Start, UKS, Oslo (2019); Finally you are in me, Taylor Macklin, Zurich (2018). Recent group exhi­bi­tions and screen­ings: Anticorps, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2020); Sâr Dubnotal, CAC Bretigny, (2020); Noise!, Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem (2018); Cruising Pavilion, 16^th Venice Architecture Biennale (2018); Mene Mene Tekel Parsin, Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge (2017), and Ugly Feelings, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2017). Kar is the win­ner of the thir­teenth Volkskrant Visual Arts Prize 2020 and will soon have solo exhi­bi­tions at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris (2021) and Emalin, London (2021).