Come May to November 2021 at the 59th International Art Exhibition, la Biennale di Venezia, an installation by the influential artist Füsun Onur will be presented at the Pavilion of Turkey in honor of the artist.
As one of Turkey’s pioneering contemporary artists, Füsun Onur’s works deal with .potentials of space, time, rhythm and form that are inherent in simple, everyday materials charged with narrative and oblique autobiographical references.
In her prolific career that spans over half a century, Onur defied boundaries between painting and sculpture, becoming a pivotal figure to introduce avant-garde into the artistic canon in Turkey in the early 1970s.
She participated in solo and group exhibitions at the Augarten Contemporary, Vienna (2010), Istanbul Modern (2011), Maçka Art Gallery, Istanbul (2012), and ARTER, Istanbul (2014). Her works were featured at the Kunsthalle Baden-Baden (2001), ZKM, Karlsruhe (2004) and Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2005) as well as in the Istanbul Biennials (1987, 1995, 2011, 2015), the Moscow Biennale (2007), Documenta (2013) and Kassel (2012).
A graduate of Üsküdar American Academy for Girls, Onur studied Sculpture in the Academy of Fine Arts in Istanbul, became a student at Hadi Bara Atelier, and moved on to her post-graduate studies in Sculpture at the Maryland College of Art with a Fulbright scholarship in 1960.
According to the advisory board of the Pavilion of Turkey at la Biennale di Venezia, which consists of Serhan Ada from Bilgi University; the general manager of Suna and İnan Kıraç Foundation, Culture, and Arts Enterprises Özalp Birol; artist İnci Eviner; director and curator of the Fiorucci Art Trust Milovan Farronato, and editor of Sanat Dünyamız and art writer Fisun Yalçınkaya, Onur is one of the rare artists to form a poetic relationship between life and art.
“Füsun Onur is one of the rare artists to form a poetic relationship between life and art beyond just artworks, but as a way of being. She explores the fundamental orientations of conceptual art through her poetry. The installations of Füsun Onur stand out with their ability to erase the universally defined boundaries such as identity, culture, and language, and to linger as a musical note in living beings, regardless of place and space” the board said.
The Pavilion of Turkey is located in its long-term venue at the Arsenale, secured by the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (İKSV) for the duration of 20 years from 2014 to 2034.
The 59th International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia will be curated by Cecilia Alemani.