Ahmet Doğu İpek: A Halo of Blackness Upon Our Heads

Published in the context of Ahmet Doğu İpek’s solo exhibition which brings together works that the artist has created with various mediums between 2020–2022, the book titled A Halo of Blackness Upon Our Heads features a text written by the exhibition’s curator Selen Ansen, as well as commissioned essays by Cana Bostan, Gökçen Erkılıç and Nevzat Sayın which explore İpek’s works stemming from natural phenomena through the lens of reflections proposed by the exhibition. Designed by Ali Emre Doğramacı, the publication also includes reproduction images and exhibition photographs by Hadiye Cangökçe, flufoto (Barış Aras & Elif Çakırlar) and Sena Nur Taştekne. Taking place in Arter’s -1 floor between 19 May 2022 and 29 January 2023, the exhibition A Halo of Blackness Upon Our Heads presents a world only just born, yet already brimming with countless experiences, a multitude of narrations, innumerable revolutions both past and still to come, microscopic and grandiose transformations, quantities of small and grand destructions. Although figurative for the most part, İpek’s works reflect the climate of our epoch by means of abstraction, emphasising in a covert manner the small and broad-scale events that impact our lives. In a broader sense, these works allow us to reach that which our hands or our eyes cannot grasp: skys, darknesses, subterranean forces, tectonic movements, buried memories, the infinitesimal, the immensely big, the far-off, the too near.