Artist Asli Torcu @ Pi Artworks Istanbul - "Touched by Image" Exhibition

Asli Torcu

Touched by Image

Pi Artworks Istanbul

15 March – 3 May 2025

" Each photograph contains a riddle, and the human gaze

directed towards it reveals this riddle, which is

the echo of its own questioning.’’

-Michel Frizot

ASLI TORCU

Evcilik Oyunu, 2019

Mixed media on geotextile, 100-x-150-cm

© Aslı Torcu / Courtesy of Pi Artworks

Pi Artworks Istanbul is pleased to present Touched by Image, a solo exhibition by ASLI TORCU. In this exhibition, the artist presents works that explore the disappearance and rebirth of images in uncertainty.

Touched by Image is a space of discovery that exposes the fragile nature of time and memory. The paintings are made in layers, carrying traces from the past into the present, reflecting the paradoxes of memory and time. With their multilayered surfaces—sometimes erased, sometimes re-emerging—these works reveal an evolutionary process informed by uncertainty and the inevitability of change.

"Like the primordial chaos in which all elements are mixed together," (Ovidius, " Metamorphoses ") past, present, and future intertwine on the artist’s canvases, evolving into new meanings. The paintings encourage the viewer to confront the images that undoubtedly exist within themselves and to question the riddles and triggers they provoke. However, there is no definite solution to this conundrum; the past remains an uncertain space, constantly reconstructed through the spontaneity of images from the present. 

As well as documenting lost images, the paintings also engage with themes of childhood and discovery. In one painting, two children are attempting to discover treasures. This symbolizes the joy of human curiosity and the necessity of reflection in survival itself. However, this discovery does not only reference the past; it also offers the possibility of evolution and future understanding. These moments, suspended in a timeless void, are reshaped in the traces of the past and continue to exist in constant transformation.

William James' concept of “touch-images” offers an important key to the way these works are experienced. According to James, some images are not limited to visual perception; they can sometimes trigger a bodily response and evoke a physical resonance in the viewer. In the artist's works, colours, textures and forms speak to the viewer not only through the gaze, but also with an intuitive and tactile intensity. ‘Touched by Image’ functions as a laboratory that questions the concepts of memory and time, while offering a space for reflection on the existence of images. The exhibition invites the viewer to confront their own past, lost images and their echoes today. Each painting exists as a puzzle, a call and an endeavour to remember in the midst of uncertainty. However, rather than reaching a definitive conclusion, this endeavour is experienced as a process open to wandering between images, getting lost and reappearing.  

ASLI TORCU (b. 1981, Turkey)

Aslı Torcu has been living and working in Paris, France. After graduating from Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, Department of Painting, she continued her education in France and completed her PhD at Paris VIII University, where she also taught. She is currently working as a lecturer at the École Supérieure d'Art de Dunkerque-Tourcoing.

Her practice is closely related to the subject of memory and is inspired by archive images. Her practice, which is figurative in essence, emerges from a search for an atmosphere of colour based on pictorial abstraction.                             

PI ARTWORKS ISTANBUL

Piyalepasa Istanbul, 32 B Piyalepaşa Bulvarı, Istanbul

www.piartworks.com

Xiaoze Xie @ Pi Artworks London - "Lost Tales and Recovered Histories" Exhibition

Xiaoze Xie

Lost Tales and Recovered Histories 

Pi Artworks London

14 March - 17 April 2024

Lost Tales and Recovered Histories at Pi Artworks London brings together two bodies of work: recent paintings from The Library Series and a new sculpture series titled Amber of History by Chinese American artist XIAOZE XIE. Through installation, sculpture, and painting, Xiaoze Xie explores the interrelatedness of books, libraries, and historical events, interrogating the vulnerability and deterioration of history and memory.

The Library Series is Xie’s largest body of work. Begun in 1993 when he was studying painting at The University of North Texas, the series has evolved as Xioze Xie has developed as an artist and teacher. When visiting libraries in the U.S. and around the world for research, Xiaoze Xie would photograph the arrangements of books left on the shelves by librarians, his one rule being that he could never reposition them in his paintings. It is the newest works from the series that are on display here: featuring books from the Guimet Museum in Paris, the Library of Congress in Washington D.C, and the Hubei Provincial Library in Wuhan, China, Xiaoze Xie uses a rich palette to give hints of the books’ content and emotional resonance, and to evoke the space and atmosphere of the institutions that house them. In Xie’s paintings, books, like the ideas within them, are subject to neglect and deterioration. Yet their preservation and continued existence, in however reduced forms, is a testament to their importance and the people who love, and care for them.

These themes of loss and absence are also present in Xie’s sculptural works, inspired by the discovery of Mogao Cave 17 at Dunhuang, China. Built during the late Tang Dynasty (851-862 A.D.), Cave 17 (also known as the Library Cave) was once the memorial hall of Dunhuang’s chief monk Hong Bian, and contained around 50,000 items including Buddhist sutras, literature, cultural relics, and artworks, before it was sealed. In 1900, the cave was rediscovered, and the majority of artefacts—nearly 40,000 documents, scriptures, and other cultural relics—were successively purchased by European expeditioners.

For Xioze Xie, the Library Cave and Dunhuang have been an important artistic influence for nearly a decade, and his series of resin sculptures, Amber of History, which includes Rain of Languages (2023) and Splendor of Colors (2023), takes the architectural form and physical dimension of the Library Cave as their starting point.The artist centres his imaginative explorations on the dialectical concepts of “plenitude/emptiness”or “gathering/absence”to make works here that figuratively restore the Library Cave’s voluminous holdings. In doing so, he analyses civilizational connections, notions of material abundance, and concretizes the idea of “a rain of language”

Ultimately, Xiaoze Xie’s project deals with the Library Cave’s complex and troubling history of dislocation and loss, as well as preservation and transformation of culture. His wider practice resonates with the ongoing discussions on ethical issues surrounding the acquisition of relics of other countries by Western institutions, and the controversy surrounding repatriation, and discarding of cultural artefacts.

XIOZE XIE (b. 1966, Guangdong Province, China)

Xie is an internationally recognized artist and the Paul L. & Phyllis Wattis Professor of Art at Stanford University. He received his MA in Fine art from the Central Academy of Arts & Design in Beijing and the University of North Texas, and has a BA in Engineering in Architecture from Tsinghua University. m, San Jose Museum of Art and Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art. Xioze Xie received the 2022 Asia Game Changer West Award from the Asia Society Northern California, the Academic Award in Painting in The Third Nanjing International Art Festival (2016), the Painters and Sculptors Grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation (2013), the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2003), and artist awards from the Dallas Museum of Art and Phoenix Art Museum.

Permanent collections include: The Baltimore Museum of Art, Denver Art Museum, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Oakland Museum of California, San Francisco Asian Art Museum, San Jose Museum of Art and Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art.

PI ARTWORKS LONDON

55 Eastcastle Street, London W1W 8EG

www.piartworks.com