The exhibit “Life is Elsewhere" of Laleper Aytek, presents 40 of artist’s black and white photographs taken at various cities, islands or sea fronts in Turkey, France or Greece between the years 2016 and 2019.

Where is life?

How long is life?

When is life?

Life smashes and destroys. As it crumbles, (its) questions arise.

Most of which are with answers, confused (lost?) by being shifted from state to state, the mind, the heart, the body, the soul change, wander, suffer, keep quiet, scream, revolt or accept what life brings and what it takes away.

The heart sinks, the eye remains silent…

The scar keeps growing, the water deepens…

If to live is to be other, as Fernando Pessoa says, and if it means transformation, how many others do we become?

The rough fabric of everyday life, a suffocation, a smile, a share of the muted or a protest of the heart diffuse into all of our senses and attempts to transgress life, us…

The heart, the mind, the soul always looks for a way out.

A path, a trace to follow.

A touch, a gaze.

A voice, a face.

When drifts from one face to another -those that are not or cannot be touched, that are feared to be touched, that are avoided, that cannot be asked, that are hidden-, the heart does not ask for permission…

And I “long for a gaze that will pull me out from darkness and deliver me to a full, visible, complete existence. I fill myself as if I were filling ink in a pen. With images, words, the lived and the unlived, with what has come to an end and the never-ending... With everything by which I can call “myself” ... I create a self who can tell about tomorrow, and many tomorrows to come. From the “me”s that are disintegrated, multiplied, scattered around like pieces of shattered glass; the ones that grew inside me to die and the ones still unable to be born. Waiting, staring into darkness, dreaming, forgetting, healing my wounds, unwinding by shedding shells... Like the sound of a shepherd’s pipe luring all the words of the town, I am standing by the window of being and seek out a destiny for myself. Among the moments struck by darkness, from the unstoppable time, amongst the images reflected onto the same glass, that are juxtaposed and vague, the stories intertwined like wild grass, the ghosts caught by light... “[1]

in emptiness,

within me,

in the wind,

in the night.

like a trace,

an autumn,

a line of verse,

an instant / a memory

my heart seeks a riot

if I find it, I will go there.

Laleper Aytek

Aslı Erdoğan, “I Call Out to You At Night” in In the Silence of Life.