CRITICAL ESSAYS
About the Work of Rahsan Düren
Written by Aydın Esen (pianist, composer)
When we speak about contemporary art, we often find ourselves discussing trends, movements, theories, markets, and institutions. These conversations may be necessary, but they frequently obscure the simple fact that art begins with an encounter. Before interpretation, before analysis, before critical frameworks, there is a moment in which a work either awakens something within us or it does not. My experience with the art of Rahşan Düren has always begun with such moments.
As a musician, I have spent a lifetime listening, to sounds, silences, gestures, spaces, and the invisible relationships that connect them. Music taught me long ago that meaning is rarely located in the obvious. It often resides in what remains unsaid, in the interval between two notes, in the tension between movement and stillness. When I encounter Rahşan's paintings and sculptures, I find myself responding to a similar phenomenon. Her work does not declare itself. It unfolds. It reveals itself gradually, through attention.
This quality is increasingly rare. We live in a period that rewards immediacy. Images compete for attention with unprecedented urgency. The contemporary viewer is often encouraged to consume rather than contemplate. Against this backdrop, her work proposes a different rhythm. It asks us to slow down. It asks us to inhabit uncertainty. It invites us into a space where perception itself becomes an act of discovery.
What interests me most is the coexistence of strength and fragility throughout her work. The sculptures possess undeniable presence. They stand before us with conviction, yet they never become authoritarian. They seem to carry traces of memory, vulnerability, and transformation. Their forms suggest emergence rather than completion, as though they are still becoming themselves. This openness gives them a distinctly human dimension.
At times I am reminded of the intellectual landscapes inhabited by Robert Musil and Hermann Broch. Not because the works illustrate literary ideas, but because they share a profound sensitivity to ambiguity. Both writers understood that reality exceeds our attempts to define it. We the modernists recognize complexity not as a problem to be solved but as a condition of existence. RD's art appears to inhabit a similar territory. Feels like her works resist simplification. They remain alive because they refuse final answers.
The paintings, too, possess a remarkable psychological depth. We sense an artist less concerned with representation than with revelation. What emerges on the surface is never merely visual. Beneath the forms lies a subtle emotional architecture. Colors, textures, and spatial relationships function almost like musical harmonies. Their significance cannot be reduced to individual elements. Meaning arises through interaction, resonance, and contrast.
I see lots of music in her work. I know how much she loves listening and exploring all kinds of complex musical pieces. Looking at any of her paintings, one thinks less about objects than about intervals. The eye moves through the composition much as the ear moves through a complex improvisation. Certain forms act like recurring motifs. Others appear unexpectedly, altering the balance of the whole. Tensions accumulate and dissolve. Rhythms emerge beneath the visible surface. The work unfolds in time, despite its apparent stillness.
A sculpture, a novel, a symphony, or a painting may differ in material and form, yet all seek to illuminate aspects of existence that ordinary language struggles to contain. The most compelling works create spaces in which thought, feeling, memory, and imagination converge. Most recent works shows the increasing confidence. There is no sense of artistic hesitation. Nor is there any desire to conform to prevailing expectations. The work appears guided by an inner necessity. It follows its own logic, its own rhythm, its own questions. Such independence is difficult to achieve and even more difficult to sustain.
The history of modern art offers many examples of artists who transformed personal visions into universal statements. One might think of the spiritual intensity of Giacometti's figures, the dreamlike intelligence of Klee, the psychological spaces of Rothko, or the symbolic worlds of Louise Bourgeois. Yet the significance of these artists does not lie in style alone. It lies in their willingness to trust the authenticity of their own perceptions. Rahşan's work participates in this tradition of artistic courage.
As both artist and friend, she has always impressed me with her commitment to exploration rather than certainty. There is curiosity in her work, but also discipline. There is freedom and the structure in delicate balance. The result is an artistic language capable of remaining open while retaining coherence.
Perhaps this is what ultimately moves me most. Her works do not seek domination over the viewer. They seek dialogue. They offer themselves as occasions for reflection. They create spaces in which we may encounter not only the artwork itself but aspects of ourselves that remain hidden within the noise of everyday life.
The finest works of art continue to accompany us after we have left them. They linger in memory, not as images alone but as experiences. They alter our perception of the world in subtle ways. Her paintings and sculptures possess precisely this quality. Their presence endures. Their questions remain active. Their meanings continue to evolve.
In a culture increasingly dominated by speed, certainty, and distraction, such art performs a vital function. It reminds us that depth still matters. It reminds us that mystery is not an obstacle to understanding but one of its essential sources. Most importantly, it reminds us that genuine artistic expression remains one of the few places where complexity, beauty, vulnerability, and truth may coexist without contradiction.
Rahşan's art deserves not only admiration but sustained attention. It represents the ongoing journey of an artist who has chosen exploration over certainty, and authenticity over fashion. In doing so, she has created a body of work that speaks with quiet authority and lasting resonance. Catch her if you can. whenever wherever possible on the planet.. bravissimo .....ø.
-Aydin Esen
Rahşan Düren's "Black Abstracts"
Ali Artun, January 2025
When one speaks of "black" and "abstract," the mind turns first, inevitably, to Malevich's Black Square, exhibited in 1915: a canvas of approximately 80x80 cm that anyone could have painted. This work , the icon of abstract art , is an aesthetic manifesto. For Malevich, the Black Square is "the zero point of art": the erasure of art's entire history up to that moment. It departs from ancient geometry and arithmetic, where forms and numbers are profoundly symbolic and mysterious, and through their magic awakens a new world in cosmic harmony.
Rahşan Düren's "black abstracts" are the precise opposite of the Black Square. Not harmonic but chaotic, not utopian but dystopian, not optimistic but nihilistic. Düren does not pursue "emotion-free, pure, ideal" forms as Malevich did. Her abstractions are, on the contrary, distorted, unfinished, formless, and intensely emotional. They contain rage, hatred, curse, violence. They are dark — the darkness of the artist herself, the darkness of her inner world. They inspire both horror and awe. They crush the viewer. And yet you are swept away by the sublimity of black. You feel the beauty of terror.
Düren's abstractions do not originate in designs or conceptions, they are action art. In André Breton's term, they are the product of "psychic automatism." They are executed immediately. Everything moves as fast as the artist at the canvas. The black marks overflow from their canvases and connect with images on other canvases. The entire exhibition becomes a single work. It transforms into a terrifying atmosphere.
The Black Abstracts challenge reason, rationalism, realism, symbolism. Yes, Malevich's Black Square also opposes depiction, representation, imitation (mimesis aesthetics). But it has fallen into the mysticism of ancient mathematics, the divine symbolism of the "square" form. In El Lissitzky's words, the Black Square is "the emblem of a new world that has never been lived."
Düren's work has no such reference. It calls the viewer to her own spirituality, her temperament. The more meaningless the expression, the more powerful; the more abstract, the more visionary; the more colourless and black, the more bottomless and lightless. It violently provokes our minds and souls. These works are infinite sources of reflection and feeling.
-Ali Artun
Rahşan Düren -Play Again
Ali Artun 2026
From a kiln, a dense, jet-black liquid emerges at 350 degrees, and within five to ten seconds this liquid turns to stone. The artist kneads this magma within seconds. No reason, no consciousness but intensely loaded with emotion. Instantly created expressions. The result: a game, as Schiller defines art, a plastic game. The products of this game are serpentine black masses... creatures, ghosts, monsters, djinn; black dramas. They arouse malevolence, they arouse terror. Like Baudelaire, they display the beauty of evil.
—Ali Artun
Monument of Nothingness (Written in dedication to Rahşan Düren’s exhibition “Play Again”)
İpek Yeğinsü 2026
It burst forth with all its strength From the veins of the geoid house. Melted, frozen, heated and cold, “Civilization”, it was called.
They were all in the game, With one winner, and the loser already known. With black blood, its laws were written; Before it, knelt our epoch’s children.
As the game neared its end, They faced the monument of nothingness. Their selfhoods throbbed With the ache of awareness.
“Can’t the game end otherwise?”, One of them asked. “It’s worth a try”, replied another, So the game once more began.
-İpek Yeğinsü
Emotional Movements
Cem Akaş, 2015
The End of Land
The line ends at Haydarpaşa Train Station. This is no arbitrary ending — Haydarpaşa sits at the very edge of the sea; here, land and indeed a continent come to a close. Once a vibrant space filled with city dwellers returning from work and travellers bound for distant places, Haydarpaşa has long been out of service, pending plans to relocate the terminal and replace the old tracks with high-speed rail. It seems that soon Haydarpaşa’s only guests will be ghosts. The platforms that once overflowed with people boarding trains, alighting from them, waving, waiting for those they loved — will, it appears, before long be filled only by aged and weary echoes.
It is in such a place that an installation of oversized gold-plated needles moves in what appears to be a disordered but in fact elegantly choreographed motion. Rahşan Düren’s latest work, E-Motions, is installed in the waiting lounge of Haydarpaşa Train Station. There is a deceptive simplicity to this creation — if you enter the lounge while the installation is at rest, you may find yourself in the preparatory stage of a resurrection rite. The needles, lying on the floor at various angles to one another — resembling the sleeping Martians in H.G. Wells’s novel, or some manner of prehistoric creature gathered in a mass grave — then, at the press of a button, the graveyard stirs and a strange dance begins.
Measurement
What do these needles measure? Speed. When the body moves, the soul follows in its wake. Speed is of great importance here — if the body surpasses the soul’s natural pace, one must wait for it to catch up — something the Native Americans and the Postmodernists apparently understood very well. Düren’s needles do not measure the speed of the bodies moving along the platforms or entering and leaving trains, nor indeed the speed of their souls; what is measured here is the speed at which movements transform into emotions — emotions born of encounters made or missed, of farewells and departures, which may or may not give rise to entirely different movements and emotions in turn.
Weight
Train stations are custodians — they regulate weight. It is their responsibility to ensure that, at the end of the day (and this day’s end may come years hence), the weight arriving and the weight departing balance one another out. This extends beyond mere bodily weight, though it encompasses that too; what is at stake here is the quantity of emotion “invested” by those outside against the quantity “exported” by those within. These two quantities are in constant motion — as are the needles. If the ledger recording the accounts of arriving and departing emotion cannot be balanced, great misery and disorder may be expected to follow: the peaches of this land will gradually lose their vivid colour, and birds of prey, one by one, will begin shedding their feathers mid-flight.
Energy
Düren’s needles also measure the energy released in the encounters and farewells of the station. It is possible to experience these two phenomena in gradual increments or in sudden bursts; and yet the needles record this energy without ever losing their composure or their own rhythm — their gold plating grows imperceptibly brighter at joyful reunions, and darkens ever so slightly when met with the pain of parting.
X-Tensions
Alongside the installation, a series of the artist’s black-and-white paintings is displayed in the station’s VIP lounge, framed in the same gold-plated material. These works may be read as the projected trace of the needles’ movement in the installation — much like the printed records of a seismograph; they, too, pose the question asked by E-Motions, in a different register: how are we to understand movements, and the emotions they engender?
Context
Düren’s E-Motions shares a kinship with certain kinetic sculptures: among them, John Douglas Powers’s Ialu, Anne Lilly’s Parietals, Arthur Ganson’s Machine with Oil, and even Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Articulated Intersect. What it shares with them is a deliberate slowness — an invitation to thought in a space that has been transformed into a station of stillness, where bustle has given way to quietude, crowds to solitude, and hum to silence. Düren plunges into arrivals, departures, encounters and the emotions they engender — each one giving rise to an existential dilemma — and from this emerges a dream world inhabited by oversized needles that measure, in silence, the essence of who we are.
-Cem Akaş (2015)
