Press release

Emalin is pleased to present HEAVY GROUND, a solo exhibition by Özgür Kar (b. 1992 in Ankara, Turkey; lives and works in Amsterdam, Netherlands). This is the artist's second solo exhibition with the gallery. HEAVY GROUND comprises a new video consisting of hand-drawn animation, debuting the artist's first film work, alongside a series of works on paper.

In his practice, Özgür Kar contrasts historic and contemporary forms of cultural production to draw out their universal expressions of existentialism, whereby our sense of belonging and isolation are constantly at odds. Sincere feelings of longing, anxiety or loss are expressed in mediums and aesthetic conventions Kar draws from various cultural sources: medieval etchings, modernist theatre, 1970s hand-painted animation, or the vlogs and TikToks of the current day. He collapses contrasting affects of these forms into focused, minimalist animations and drawings – at times grotesque and graphic, at times sentimental and tender, but always speaking to a familiar human experience.

The exhibition is centred around the eponymous video work, HEAVY GROUND (2024). The hand-drawn animation tells the story of a romantic encounter between two flies stuck on a glue trap. After serenading each other in an operatic duet, heavy with emotion, the flies proceed to have tender missionary sex while coated in yellow fly-trap glue, until one of them seemingly perishes. The camera pans over their surroundings to reveal a scattering of dead flies, dramatically caught and withering in the sticky landscape of the same trap, all suffering the same fate.