{"id":13924,"date":"2012-11-06T23:38:31","date_gmt":"2012-11-07T05:38:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=13924"},"modified":"2025-11-08T22:33:01","modified_gmt":"2025-11-09T05:33:01","slug":"emre-huner-at-the-umfa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/emre-huner-at-the-umfa\/","title":{"rendered":"Emre Huner at the UMFA"},"content":{"rendered":"

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by Emily Lyver-Harris<\/span><\/p>\n

Housed in a small room in the Modern and Contemporary gallery of the Utah Museum of Fine Arts,\u00a0salt 6: Emre H\u00fcner<\/em>\u00a0plays an unlikely interlocutor to the immense retrospective,\u00a0Nancy Holt: Sightlines<\/em>, installed just one floor beneath it. If one of the central threads of\u00a0Sightlines<\/em>\u00a0is to examine Holt\u2019s works as a collection of framed perspectives, each responding to and visually delimiting their environment,\u00a0salt 6: Emre H\u00fcner<\/em>\u00a0offers a complementary (and contrasting) study of framing and perception with another set of tools altogether.<\/p>\n

The final show organized by Jill Dawsey for the UMFA,\u00a0salt 6: Emre H\u00fcner<\/em>\u00a0is the latest installment of the museum\u2019s ongoing semi-annual contemporary exhibition series. Born in Istanbul and now based in Berlin, H\u00fcner works in a range of media including film, sculpture, installation, and drawing. H\u00fcner has exhibited widely \u2013 in recent years his work has been shown in\u00a0Manifesta 9<\/em>\u00a0(2012);\u00a0Paradise Lost<\/em>\u00a0at Istanbul Modern (2011); and\u00a0Nobody\u2019s Property: Art, Land, Space<\/em>\u00a0at the Princeton University Art Museum (2010), to name a few. The work shown in\u00a0salt 6<\/em>\u00a0stems from H\u00fcner\u2019s residency at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam, where he worked in the ceramics studio.<\/p>\n

salt 6<\/em>\u00a0offers a sampling of the many media in which H\u00fcner works. The exhibition includes five ink drawings from the series\u00a0Shrine of the Post Hypnotic<\/em>\u00a0as well as two new video installations titled \u201cAeolian Processes #1 and #2,\u201d which feature a number of small sculptural objects of H\u00fcner\u2019s making. The videos are projected onto two free-standing wood and Plexiglas structures that simultaneously serve as projection screens, gallery partitions and sculptural entities in their own right.<\/p>\n

Recycling many of the same forms from H\u00fcner\u2019s\u00a0A Little Larger than the Entire Universe<\/em>, his installation for\u00a0Manifesta 9,\u00a0<\/em>the two video installations debuted in this exhibition offer a glimpse of that same universe -\u2013 but this time at a further remove, meticulously staged and heavily mediated. The contents of this universe -\u2013 an unnamable variety of found objects, alternately organic and machinic sculptural forms, and brightly colored propping devices \u2013- are choreographed for display and filmed in 16 mm (transferred to DVD for the exhibition). Each of the \u201cAeolian Processes\u201d offers an assembly of objects treated to different modes of presentation: #1, a sequence of still shots, each a filmic still life; and #2, its dynamic counterpart, a succession of sculptural objects rotating relentlessly on a potter\u2019s wheel, the camera continuously shifting distance and focus. Standing at the fulcrum of these two screens, positioned adjacent to one another, the viewer is able to compare these methods concurrently, to evaluate the effects of each mode of display.<\/p>\n

In the exhibition\u2019s corresponding essay, Dawsey characterizes H\u00fcner\u2019s work as an \u201callusive universe\u201d \u2014 his work pulls from an ever-expanding source bank of references, rooted in diverse fields of knowledge that reach indiscriminately to various moments in art historical, literary, and scientific domains. H\u00fcner constructs topographies of disparate, and often incongruous, components staged in tense relationship to one another. H\u00fcner\u2019s works in\u00a0salt 6<\/em>\u00a0are fraught with suggestive gestures that are not only allusive, but also elusive. Never offering a complete citation, H\u00fcner\u2019s references are instead oblique and incomplete hints at another source, always pointing elsewhere but never exactly anywhere.<\/p>\n

The effect of these indirect references is a certain sense of alienation. Assembled together under some unidentifiable category, the objects in H\u00fcner\u2019s scenes are in exile, dislocated apparently for purposes of display. An interrogation of practices of presentation (and their consequences) underwrites the exhibition in its entirety. Here the structures of mediation are not silent or supplementary, but rather vocal collaborators that bear weight on the work itself. We cannot ignore the constant flicker and flash of the film, nor the irregular and obtrusive constructions that house the screens. The framing devices are conspicuous and leave no work exempt \u2014 the series of drawings, mounted in a neat row on the wall in discrete white frames, are implicated as well by proximity. We become acutely aware of the layers of arbitration that delineate each of the works and the show itself.<\/p>\n

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Emre H\u00fcner, XV from the series The Shrine of the post hypnotic, 2012, ink on paper, courtesy the artist and Rodeo, Istanbul.<\/p><\/div>\n

\n<\/div>\n

The climatologic process that \u201cAeolian Processes\u201d makes reference to in its title \u2014 the erosive power of wind in shaping the landscape \u2014 is echoed in the transformative force of display. The geologic landscape is malleable to the covert pursuits of wind, just as H\u00fcner\u2019s scenes are subject to the impact of their displacement and re-presentation. H\u00fcner\u2019s recursive technique of bearing new work from the seeds of the old allows us to trace the same forms through many of his works. As they resurface, the forms are largely unchanged; it is instead the variable framing methods that shift our perception and generate new meanings. The story changes every time it is told.
\nsalt 6: Emre H\u00fcner<\/em>\u00a0is at the\u00a0Utah Museum of Fine Arts\u00a0<\/a>through January 13, 2013.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Emily Lyver-Harris Housed in a small room in the Modern and Contemporary gallery of the Utah Museum of Fine Arts,\u00a0salt 6: Emre H\u00fcner\u00a0plays an unlikely interlocutor to the immense retrospective,\u00a0Nancy Holt: Sightlines, installed just one floor beneath it. If one of the central threads of\u00a0Sightlines\u00a0is to examine […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":14009,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_piecal_is_event":false,"_piecal_start_date":"","_piecal_end_date":"","_piecal_is_allday":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,14],"tags":[1105,1104,832],"class_list":["post-13924","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-exhibition_reviews","category-visual_arts","tag-by-emily-lyver-harris","tag-emre-huner","tag-umfa"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/11\/0bl040.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-05 19:39:06","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13924","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13924"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13924\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":98108,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13924\/revisions\/98108"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14009"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13924"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13924"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13924"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}