For her first solo exhibition at Riverrun, titled A Glossary of Distance and Desire (An Ongoing Attempt), Meriç Algün presents a new body of work that stems from her interest in the separation of continents, formation of boundaries, love and desire. The main installation takes the form of a tangram table –a dissection puzzle consisting of seven shapes that can be arranged in different configurations. The work brings together different materials like plant fossils from the Carboniferous era, clay sculptures, maps, texts and a range of objects related to distance and desire. Placed on the flat geometric surfaces of the tangram, the objects are open to associations and interpretation, not unlike words waiting to be placed into a sentence. Algün draws our attention to how, in a world of fetishized individualism and reckless consumption of earth’s resources, love too is under threat and the only way out is through finding ways to relate to one another.

For the last 10 years, working with a variety of media, Algün has been using her own experience of migrating over cultural, linguistic and bureaucratic borders as a starting point to speak about topics that concern many. She often identifies particular contexts and works within set parameters rooted in order and control, to reveal and punctuate relations between elements of complex structures. Language and translation play a prominent role in her practice, for instance in the work Ö (The Mutual Letter) (2011) from the 12th Istanbul Biennial, she made a dictionary with all the common words between Swedish and Turkish languages. Algün cleverly underlines how normative systems and restrictions are influencing what is possible for us to say and do.

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A Glossary of Distance and Desire (An Ongoing Attempt)

Installation with objects in seven various parts

Total size: 300 x 300 x 80 cm

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