A personal story, the artist’s performance Lifting a Secret combines coffee and vaseline to create legible text on the surface of a wall, creating a self-contained artwork. She writes with vaseline onto the wall, and through dumping the coffee with a cup onto it for hours and hours, the writings become visible and readable step by step. Ekici’s performance relates to the traditional ceremony of brewing the perfect cup of coffee and proving she is ready for marriage. As a young man comes visiting her and her parents with his parents, she has to serve the coffee in a traditional way. The artist explains her frustrations with the antiquity of this ritual. In this performance installation, the smell of coffee and the writing on the wall remain in the gallery throughout the exhibition, relics of the past in just such a way as the tradition itself..

Nezaket Ekici uses social and cultural quotidian experiences in her work. That context is absorbed to create a performance that uses the body as symbol, in interaction with technology and the audience. In her performances Ekici places the quotidian into a new context and invites the audience to make new associations.

The world Ekici creates takes our everyday environment and presents it to us with the beauty of minimalist sculpture. In her new eight channel video installation Kopfsonate, the artist creates a choreographed piano sonata using her body to play the musical notes. Filmed in the Black Sea, the sound of the ocean and the music Ekici has composed creates an impact exceeding the framework of art itself.

Please note that the artist will be performing Lifting a Secret the night of the opening reception.