Inci Eviner: Looping on Thin Ice

Shanghai—Pearl Lam Galleries is delighted to present Looping on Thin Ice, the first solo exhibition by acclaimed Turkish artist Inci Eviner in China, featuring videos, drawings, collage on paper, and paintings. The exhibition centres on her video installations, which are a result of a collaborative production process with her works on paper that will be displayed interactively in the exhibition space. 

“Looping on Thin Ice” refers to the circulation of visual languages that reference and speak to one another and that are informed by the artist’s persistent concern for the social conditions in her nation. Inci Eviner’s works explore the action of continuity and repetition of strange and unsettling movements—caressing, punching, undressing, and people merging—performed by men, women, genderless humans, and even hybrid human-animal beasts. What sets Eviner’s art in this continuous loop is her reproduction and restaging of similar characters and movements inspired by American philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler’s concept of “performativity”, which is the very act of performing gender that constitutes who we are, for the idea of gender is a historical and social construct and not essential to our sex. Since the act of gender has been rehearsed and practiced by subjects through continual citation or enactment, it can also be challenged and contested through alternative performative acts. This alternative is where Eviner comes in, who is determined to rupture the cultural code by presenting sexually and physically active female bodies that threaten to rise up against the social order, opening up a new territory for freedom.