Colors 2017/2016/2012/2010/2008
Installation view, Wentrup Gallery, Berlin, 2012
Coloured nylon stockings, Poul Henningsen lamps
Installation view, Tactics of Invisibility, Arter, Istanbul, 2011
Installation view, Tactics Of Invisibility, Tanas, Berlin, 2010
Installation view, U-Turn Quadriennale, Copenhagen, 2008
Colors, dotes and stripes, 2017
Colors, orange, 2017
Colors, red net, 2017
Colors, day and night
Colors, blue red, 2012
Colors, green blue, 2012
Colors, yelllow lack dotted, 2012
Colors, brown black, 2008
Colors, red blue, 2010
Colors, black blue, 2010
Colors, green black, 2010
Colors, red pink, 2010
Colors, camouflage, 2010
Colors, pink nude, 2010
Colors, yellow green, 2010
Colors, violet red, 2010
Colors, black white, 2010
Colors, turquoise white, 2010
Various sizes: Poul Henningsen lamps
PH4/3, H 20 cm, Ø 40 cm
PH5, H 28,5 cm, Ø 50 cm
PH 5-4½ Charlottenborg, H 31,8 cm, Ø 46,6 cm
PH 6½-6 Charlottenborg, H 50 cm, Ø 65 cm
In Nevin Aladağ’s piece Colors we encounter colour on multiple levels. Phenomenologically we are confronted with a set of lamps whose luminosity and appearance was masked by coloured tights. Through the title alone (and its North American spelling), the artist embeds this work in a discourse around skin-colours and politics. Already in 1952 Ralph Ellison decries the social invisibility through a “wrong” colour of skin in his novel “Invisible Man”. Moreover, Colors points to Dennis Hopper’s movie “Colors” from 1988, which can be seen as a sociological study on colour in a metaphorical and literal sense: here gang life and graffiti are at stake. Furthermore, Aladağ uses lamps that refer to Danish design icon Poul Henningsen’s classics and makes them undergo a sculptural and gender loaded alteration. Colors brings therewith various readings of colouration together, on an epistemological, sociological and aesthetic level that let us question the (in)visibility of colour.
(excerpt of the text by Nico Anklam)