Dual and Plural will be on view at Öktem Aykut from January 6th to February 7th, 2026.
Dedicated to Alpagut Gültekin, curated by Ayşe Orhun Gültekin and composed of works by Sarkis, Dual and Plural’s opening will take place on Tuesday, January 6th, 2026, from 18:30 to 20:30.
Dual and Plural is a special exhibition: Selected by Ayşe Orhun Gültekin, 116 titles from among the books and periodicals published by Norgunk since its founding in 2002 have been transformed by Sarkis into individual “book-clocks” for this occasion. Having previously turned books into artworks by adding of simple clock mechanisms, the artist follows a similar procedure in Dual and Plural, this time dedicated to Norgunk’s living memory, and to his friend and one of Norgunk’s founders, Alpagut Gültekin, who passed away in 2024 – turning this corpus into a heartbeat, a breath, and an installation that is distinctly plural.
A double-sided neon produced by Sarkis in his own handwriting for Norgunk stands at the heart of these 116 works, which unfold throughout the entirety of the gallery space, encircling the visitor. The timeline that started with Alpagut Gültekin and Ayşe Orhun Gültekin –Norgunk’s two founders– is transmuted into “book-clocks” which carry their own temporalities – rendering the memory of the publishing house into material form. These “book-clocks” become a point of articulation between space and time, the act of reading and the body, the reader and the viewer, the book as object and the clock mechanism; they propose a library of the imagination which stretch out in the minds of each reader-viewer in their own timelines. But after all, we don’t really know, since it all happens right beside a conversation between two sides, whatever that is!
January 6 – February 7, 2026
