Mehmet Ali Uysal

Mehmet Ali Uysal creates large scale installations that are integrated into the material of the building they are situated in, transforming the venue and altering both the viewer's perception of the space as well as how they move around it. Today, the process of creating, exhibiting, and perceiving contemporary art is deeply intertwined with the austere, white walled gallery space that continuously erases traces of its history to look perfect and untouched. Uysal wants to invert this tradition and revive the gallery space as a living entity by interfering directly with the structure of the white cube and deconstructing both its formal characteristics and inherited traditions. Uysal's recent Peel series creates the illusion that the claddings of a gallery's walls have become like the skin of a dissected body that is malleable enough to be pinched, ripped and torn off. In other recent work, he takes other common facets of the gallery space and similarly turns them from architectural limitations into the material, form, and content of the work that is the focus of attention. In Suspended, picture frames, which traditionally function as borders to mark the limits of a work of art, lose this function and instead become contorted and deformed specimens, hung on the wall for appraisal like caught animals. ...

Pi Artworks is an international contemporary art gallery with spaces in London and Istanbul. Its mission is to offer a diverse and active programme that initiates social change. Pi Artworks was founded in Istanbul in 1998. By moving to London in 2013, Pi Artworks wanted to make connections, explore “shared histories”, and bridge artists from different geographies. Pi Artworks London is located in Fitzrovia in the heart of London's West End. Pi Artworks Istanbul gallery relocated to PIyalepasa in close proximity to Arter Museum, with a 350 sq mt. space designed by Polat Group. Since its inception, the gallery has worked with emerging and established artists with the aim of allowing their work to grow in terms of new projects and exhibitions. Pi Artworks now represents a total of eighteen international artists, two-thirds of whom are female. The gallery is also a member of London Collective, and IGA (International Galleries Alliance). ...