This is an intriguing exhibition in a suburb not usually associated with the arts. The directors of YUNT, a highly innovative gallery founded in 2023, invite visitors to witness the creation process of a pair of horse sculptures, which the Istanbul-born contemporary artist Guido Casaretto will produce using sculptural moulds installed within the space.
Casaretto’s encounter with a series of studies on trade relations between Venice and Istanbul during the Ottoman period led him to a curious tale in which the Ottoman sultan asked the Doge of Venice for a unicorn. Casaretto traces the rich associations evoked by the image of the unicorn and brings a replica of 19th-century bronze casting moulds, originally brought from Italy to Turkey, into the exhibition space at YUNT. The artist will then collect discarded materials from the surroundings of YUNT to use in the production of the horse sculptures. Ultimately the aim is to create a social setting that explores the possibilities of togetherness by involving the audience in the casting process, which unfolds over the duration of the exhibition,.
In her text on the exhibition at YUNT, the art historian Agata Polizzi connects Casaretto’s interest in the traces left by migrations between East and West to the artist’s own roots. She describes the exhibition as an “emotional archaeology” filtered through the artist’s memory. In this way, Casaretto’s journey into his own past intersects with the shared memory of Mediterranean peoples, and the exhibition opens up a space for rethinking both personal and collective narratives.
The tradition of equestrian sculpture dating back to ancient times is reinterpreted in the exhibition through Casaretto’s gestures of repetition, copying and multiplication. As the art historian and critic Prof. Esra Aliçavuşoğlu states in the exhibition text, “with a riderless, emperor-less, and anti-heroic horse sculpture, the artist focuses not only on appropriating knowledge but also on the memory of space, the traced form, and cultural transmissions.” Thus, “the dominant representation of the idealised, along with the iconography of victory, gradually dissolves at the edges of the space’s historical memory, stripped of the meanings once ascribed to it.”
Issue 67, December 2024
Beauty in the Wilderness
