Press Release: Hale Tenger

New Works: 97.4
11.15.97

THE INTERNATIONAL ARTIST-IN-RESIDENCE PROGRAM

New Works: 97.4

Nate Cassie, SAN ANTONIO, TX

I–igo Manglano-Ovalle, CHICAGO, IL

Hale Tenger, ISTANBUL, TURKEY

Exhibition: December 11, 1997 ?nuary 11, 1998

The International Artist-in-Residence Program, sponsored by ArtPace, A Foundation
for Contemporary Art | San Antonio presents New Works: 97.4, a series of
installations by artists living and working at ArtPace. Nate Cassie, I–igo Manglano-
Ovalle and Hale Tenger were selected by the March 1996 IAIR Program Panel consisting
of Elizabeth Armstrong, David Avalos, Dana Friis-Hansen, Thelma Golden and Maaretta
Jaukkuri. Work produced by the artists during their eight-week residency will open to the
public on Thursday, December 11, 1997.

Hale Tenger

Based in Istanbul, Turkey, Hale Tenger was born in 1960 in Izmir, Turkey. Since the
early 1990s Tenger has been exhibiting throughout Europe. Following her successful
installation at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, this is Tenger's
second one-person exhibition in the United States.. Her work is renown in Turkey where
she has exhibited at Galerie Nev, Women's Library and Research Center and the Gallery
of Ataturk Library in Istanbul. She has been in exhibitions in the Netherlands, Belgium,
Germany, Poland, and France. She has been included in the 1997 Johannesburg
Biennial, the 1995 and 1992 Istanbul Biennials and the 1994 Sao Paulo
Biennial.

Tenger's evocative, haunting installations personalize the social and political. Using
found objects, historical artifacts, photography, and audio, Tenger investigates specific
events and figures, injecting a visual narration that engages the viewer's sense of site,
scale, and time. Although a sense of authenticity and time are expressed in Tenger's
installations, the work does not utilize drama or theater to reproduce an event or an
environment.

Tenger's installation, The Closet, is a layer of memories from her past, both
recent and remote. Upon entering the gallery space, one enters a hallway-cum-dining
room?able is set, curtains are drawn, a radio drones with the broadcast of a soccer
game and the news of a 1980 Turkish political coup. The viewer passes through a
swinging door into a larger room, again, with musty curtains drawn, lit only by a dim
desk lamp. The room contains a number of perfectly made beds, a dresser, an armoire
and two desks. One desk displays a children's workbook with its penmanship exercise
interrupter at the line "Er šlÃ¼r adi kalir." (A man dies but his name remains.) There are
no decorations on the bare walls. The viewer is drawn into the final space, a closet lit
with a bare bulb, filled with a colorful treasure of clothes, blankets, luggage, and boxes.
The closet space is intimate, a warm kaleidoscopic world in its own sense, on its own
terms. The static feel of the rooms is in contrast with the viewer's movement through
them? Closet is at once a partially-installed museum and a diary with missing pages,
suspended in time.

445 North Main Avenue San Antonio TX 78205 t 210 212 4900 f 210 212 4990 www.artpace.org