Severed body parts in fluffy textiles, flashing sentences from a paragraph of George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984” that explains how you can scare people into submission, and glossy photos of a young man in 3D goggles running along the torrid landscape of a post-apocalyptic world greet the audiences at the maze-like exhibition space in the heart of Istanbul. Clearly, the emerging talents selected in the 2019 edition of the Mamut Art Project are mostly a grim bunch who are inspired by dystopian literature, regional strife and Ahmed Saadawi’s award-winning novel “Frankenstein in Baghdad.”
“Yes, some of the works are pessimistic,” agreed Seren Ojalvo-Oner, director of the Mamut Art Project, as she tours the exhibition with a group of journalists. “But there is also a lot of irony, a lot of experimentation with forms and strong undertexts,” she told Al-Monitor.
