By Jack Brittle, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
Until September 1, Alize Zorlutuna’s exhibition, We Who Have Known Many Shores, is being displayed at the Art Gallery of Burlington’s (AGB) Lee-Chin Family Gallery.
Zorlutuna, who is of Turkish descent, described the exhibit as “bringing together work across a number of disciplines, from textiles to video to ceramics.”
“It’s contending with questions around diaspora and our relationships to place, land, and culture,” said Zorlutuna.
Zorlutuna said they drew on the material culture of their ancestry to explore what it means to be “diasporic living on Turtle Island.” Turtle Island is a name used for North America by some First Nations people.
Zorlutuna said that the exhibition is the culmination of a decade of research looking at the material culture of the Middle East, and specifically Turkey.
They said they were particularly inspired by ebru, a kind of Anatolian paper marbling.
“I’ve paired it with printmaking in a series of prints, and then I’ve also marbled the silkworks, which are large scale, hand-marbled,” Zorlutuna said. “It’s a big installation of silk panels that are also hand-painted with bodies of water my ancestors would have known.”
The exhibit also features ceramics that have been drawn from forms in an archaeological archive, which have also been marbled.
Zorlutuna said they hope that including many different art forms in the exhibit will provide visitors with many entry points to the themes and art featured in their exhibition.
“If you grew up with carpets, there’s an installation of carpets in the centre of the exhibition called ‘Leaving the Table,’ and there are some carpets in it that I’ve handmade, that reference forms from Turkish and Egyptian carpets, and also the waterways around Kingston, Ontario,” Zorlutuna said.
“I’ve activated it by serving tea and inviting people into conversations about how we came to be here on this land,” they continued.
“I want to invite people into this conversation,” Zorlutuna said. “A critical conversation about what it means to be living on Turtle Island as people from elsewhere. So for me, [when] titling it ‘Leaving the Table,’ I was thinking about that phrase ‘not having a seat at the table’ or ‘having a seat at the table,’ but thinking about what if we actually turned away from the table. How would we gather? And in my culture, we would gather traditionally, on carpets, on the floor.”
Zorlutuna also said that by having conversations with their Indigenous colleagues, they gained more appreciation for the earth, and for water, both of which are very important in Indigenous culture, as well as in Zorlutuna’s own.
When guests enter the exhibition, they are greeted with a glass of water, placed on a hand-crocheted doily made by Zorlutuna’s grandmother.
Zorlutuna says that when creating the works featured in the exhibit, they used “traditional material processes, but in a contemporary way.”
They also said that one of the themes of the exhibit is having conversations around colonization.
“[I thought about] how I can be an accomplice to invite people to think critically about how we came to be here and how we can move in a good way on these lands,” Zorlutuna said.
This is also Zorlutuna’s first solo art exhibit at a major art gallery, something that they are very excited about.
“I’ve been practicing for a long time, and it’s hard to keep going sometimes as an artist,” Zorlutuna said. “So it’s been a huge experience for me to have this monumental solo exhibition because for me, it’s huge. It’s also huge in scale, there’s so much work in it.”
Zorlutuna, who lives in Toronto, gained a lot of appreciation for the AGB during their work on the exhibit.
“I fell in love with the AGB and the whole community around the gallery,” Zorlutuna said. “And what Suzanne [Carte, artistic director and curator] is doing with the space, the artists she’s inviting and the programming, I really had such an incredible time working on this exhibition.”
We Who Have Known Many Shores is currently on display at the AGB until September 1. To find out more about the exhibit, visit https://agb.life/visit/exhibitions/we-who-have-known-many-shores. For more information about Zorlutuna’s work, visit their website, https://alizezorlutuna.com/.
