Talk

Erdem Taşdelen will discuss his multidisciplinary practice involving video, installation, sculpture, drawing, and artist books along with recent works on view at the Contemporary Art Gallery. CAG presents two new works by Toronto-based Turkish artist Erdem Taşdelen. Commissioned by CAG 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.

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.

Biography

Erdem Taşdelen lives and works in Toronto. His multidisciplinary practice involves a range of media including installation, video, drawing, sculpture, sound and artist books. He has shown extensively internationally and across Canada, including exhibitions at Burrard Arts Foundation, Vancouver (2016); Museum für Neue Kunst, Freiburg (2016); Stacion Center for Contemporary Art, Kosovo (2015); Sakip Sabanci Museum, Istanbul (2015); Galeri NON, Istanbul (2013); Western Front, Vancouver (2013); Biennial of the Americas, Denver (2013); ARTER, Istanbul (2-13); MAK, Vienna (2013); 221A, Vancouver(2012; and Oakville Galleries (2012).