Sofra
Maçka Art Gallery, New Year Exhibition
17 Dec. 2024 - 17 Jan. 2025
Ece Duran & Oğul Öztunç
Design Team: Bilge Sayarlıoğlu, Sarp Özge, Tan Nuhoğlu, Oğuzhan Tuncay
The New Year symbolizes a revival of cosmogony, a return to the beginning of time, the purity of the first moments, and the roots of creation. The structure designed for this exhibition—a table, a roof, and a New Year’s tree—creates space for ancient New Year rituals, repeated since primordial times. It welcomes wishes for the future through words, and brings people together around a table. Rather than marking the end or the beginning of a year, it hosts a collective performance celebrating the bond between past and future, the cyclical time where endings give birth to beginnings.
In many cultures, the New Year is celebrated as the reordering of chaos, the renewal of the cosmos, and the restoration of the world to a meaningful order. As a construct, the calendar strives to organize time—an inherently chaotic phenomenon—into a system of measurement and calculation. Yet every new minute that doesn’t feel like the last reveals time’s fleeting, volatile, and immeasurable nature. This ungraspable, chaotic structure of time and the human mind's quest for order chase each other throughout the year. As an archaic habit, at the start of every year, we decorate our trees with lights, light candles on our tables, and seek to create a new order in our lives, leaving behind the chaos of the past year. In this manner, the designed table mimics the transition from chaos to cosmos, aiming to bring disorder together within a structural system—not to erase it, but to render it legible. Dozens of windows with various opening mechanisms and dimensions are arranged along a grid, while meals and people come together around a table. The structure, formed by multiplying the cross-section of a tree, also conceals a table within. The lids, placed between the interior and exterior of the structure, align along its façade like tree leaves.
