Erdem Taşdelen: "Wild Child and The Quantified Self Poems"

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Erdem Taşdelen, "Wild Child," 2015

two HD videos, 42' 05" and 20' 59" Courtesy of the artist

Thursday February 16 2017 7:00 PM - 9:00 PM PST  and Join us at 6pm for an exhibition tour by Assistant Curator Jas Lally

Join us for a special evening with Vancouver poets Daniel Zomparelli and Dina Del Bucchia

In response to Erdem Tasdelen’s The Quantified Self Poems, poet Daniel Zomparelli will speak about his work with Tasdelen and the central role collaboration plays in his creative practice. Zomparelli and frequent collaborator Dina Del Bucchia will follow with a reading from recent work. 

Zomparelli is editor-in-chief of Poetry is Dead magazine, co-podcaster of Can’t Lit and co-editor of After You, a collaborative poetry project. His first book of poems Davie Street Translations and Rom Com a collaborative book with Dina Del Bucchia are published by Talonbooks. His first collection of short stories Everything is Awful and You’re a Terrible Person will be published by Arsenal Pulp Press in Spring 2017.

Opening reception: Thursday, January 12, 7-9pm

Commissioned by the Contemporary Art Gallery in partnership with Cineworks, Wild Child is an ambitious two-part video installation which takes as its starting point, An Historical Account of the Discovery and Education of a Savage Man by Jean Marc Gaspard Itard, a physician who decided to care for a feral boy found in Aveyron, France in 1798. Convinced that he could “civilize” the boy by teaching him language, Itard was left frustrated in his attempts to make the boy transcend his so-called savagery when he proved incapable of learning to speak.

In Wild Child Taşdelen adapts the story, this time set in contemporary British Columbia and presented through two distinct elements. One video depicts preparations for an imaginary filmed documentary, featuring twelve actors as they audition for the roles of its main characters. This is accompanied by a second piece, a sequence of images of a forest, depicting "nature" in a supposedly unmediated manner. Devoid of any human activity, it provides the viewer with a space of contemplation in contrast to the interactions portrayed between performers, crew and writer/director.

Presented in our windows is The Quantified Self Poems, a new series of twelve screen prints. Over a period of three months in the summer of 2016, Taşdelen reported his moods approximately three times a day on “Emotion Sense”, a self-improvement smartphone app developed by researchers at the University of Cambridge, UK. As he answered a series of questions the artist’s feelings were numerically encoded as data effectively quantifying the unquantifiable. Working with programmer Ali Bilgin Arslan, Taşdelen developed an algorithm that translated this information into words drawn from a unique dictionary created by Vancouver-based poet Daniel Zomparelli. Unusual sentences emerge from which we attempt to make some kind of sense.

Combined each work exposes the dynamics at play through differing representations of human nature. Notionally objective reality conflates with fiction in a self-referential manner that deliberately befuddles the viewer; the familiar made compelling strange.

Wild Child is commissioned by Contemporary Art Gallery in partnership with Cineworks and is supported by BC Arts Council.

The Quantified Self Poems is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and produced with thanks to Daniel Zomparelli and Ali Bilgin Arslan.

Erdem Taşdelen lives and works in Toronto. Working across media he has shown internationally, including exhibitions at Burrard Arts Foundation, Western Front, and 221A, Vancouver; Oakville Galleries; Museum für Neue Kunst, Freiburg; Kunstverein Hannover; Biennial of the Americas, Denver; Stacion Center for Contemporary Art, Kosovo; Galeri NON, Sabanci Museum and ARTER, Istanbul; Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich and MAK, Vienna.