the story of one of us is in fact the story of us all…with no indication of a beginning or end, with nothing new proposed, these things uniting, spreading, multiplying, conjoining, and separating on paper – each is a description of quotes from this story…

ordinary, casual, familiar…a to and fro among familiar states in which an attempt is made to take a cross-section by actually cutting, and in which the details that give a description of the ordinary are reduced to, and dissolved in, a series of stains…neither the first nor the last, but ongoing…”aslımay altay göneyWhen paper cuts, when fotos are negroid…“Taken one by one, all colors are sects” Cemal SüreyaFirst you feel a touch, an unaware, suspicious, momentary touch.It’s followed by a steadily spreading warmth. Then pain. Steadily growing pain…What hurts people most is what they never expected. Like paper when it cuts.You’re amazed and agonized that this thing, so soft, could get at your hardest, most deeply hidden places and cause such bleeding.The art of Aslımay has just this power of paper to cut and hurt. By itself, this of course is no skill. The skill is in managing to generate this effect with the world’s softest object. And that is precisely what Aslımay accomplishes.If you are given away by the objects you choose to intermediate when you interpret the world, then it is right up Aslımay’s alley to tell of the vast Mediterranean using an orange peel. The object is soft, the effect is aromatic, the result casts a spell…When I first met her, Aslımay was just a schoolgirl, curious as could be and consisting of two beautiful eyes.In a land where words are abundant, she was busy trying to topple the reign of speech by asking questions of life.Years went by, and she was embodying her questions in objects to send them on their journeys. When I visited the studio with my grade-school daughter her perception of objects changed.We learned that other things besides writing could be done with paper, and that art could be cut from a piece of fabric.When I first heard about “Ongoing” I thought that we would see touches which only Aslımay could produce, and that they would concern the metaphor of continuity. But seeing the works I realized there was much more. It turns out she has gifted us with fresh questions that contain their own answers, questions about the dichotomies which make us human, about our contrasts (which only emerge when light is shed on them), and about our shades of color. In doing this she has imbued her art with the telling of a wise story which has not been over-told. And in this context she whispers intimately that art is no leftover, that on the contrary it is an integral part of our dreams and lives, both in essence and in form.Photographic film is covered with a layer of silver nitrate. Because this compound goes black when exposed to the sun, the more light there is the darker it gets. The folk of this country have an expression for it – “a negroid foto.” Realizing that the same blackness turns white and that colors acquire the equivalents they have in real life, it has come to have a dialectical perception which is technological. If our people recognize that everything seen can become its opposite, this awareness is partly due to the negroid foto.“Ongoing” finds Aslımay telling our most ancient stories with cutouts, stains, and the dialectic of a negroid foto.How should we convey this?We started out above with Cemal Süreya. We can end with him, too, since he has the most apt words to describe Aslımay, who is currently plunging into the depths of that sea which is the world…“Who once sees Ararat gains a feel for many mountainsThe truth which twenty yearsOf staring at the Marmara will not revealIs grasped by five minutesOf gazing at the ocean” Sırrı Süreyya Önder