American artist Bill Viola’s The Raft is now on display at OMM, as part of the Grief and Pleasure exhibition
OMM – Odunpazarı Modern Art Museum – one of Turkey’s major modern and contemporary art museums, will welcome visitors with a significant new video installation. The Raft (2004) by Bill Viola is being shown as part of an exhibition entitled Grief and Pleasure, which marks the museum’s third anniversary. Viola’s work emphasises the fragility of socially constructed entities like culture and class and focuses on human bonding as a common survival instinct of humankind. With an astonishing visual resemblance to Greek and Roman friezes, this slow-motion work depicts the despair of humanity in the face of disastrous tragedies.
Viola’s understanding of art deals largely with the central themes of human consciousness and experience – birth, death, love, emotion and a kind of humanist spirituality. With his use of ultra-slow motion technique in video artworks, Viola allows the viewer to immerse themselves in the image and connect deeply with the meanings it contains. Another characteristic feature of his works is his reference to mediaeval and classical depictions of emotion.
Including Bill Viola, the exhibition Grief and Pleasure showcases works from 38 international and local artists, produced in a range of media including painting, photography, sculpture, video and installation, with an aspiration to free the body from the yoke of authority and social ideologies, while holding a mirror to the changing values and norms of contemporary society. Located in Eskişehir, Turkey, OMM serves as a cross-cultural platform that exhibits modern and contemporary art from a global perspective as of 2019. Founded by art collector and businessperson Erol Tabanca, OMM is also a distinct architectural landmark designed by the world-renowned architectural firm Kengo Kuma and Associates (KKAA).
