The exhibition Dekor is based on the, imageability of the built environment, a criterion Kevin Lynch discussed in his book titled The Image of the City which was published in 1960. The artist considers the following sentences in the book as the preparatory point of the exhibition: ‘At every instant, there is more than the eye can see, more than the ear can hear, a setting or a view waiting to be explored. Nothing is experienced by itself, but always in relation to its surroundings, the sequences of events leading up to it, the memory of past experiences.’
Previously, the artist unveiled his body of work, photographs of the abandoned spaces in the Vacuum (2010) exhibition at Operation Room and shared collages that combine photographs he had taken with found material for the Illustrated Information (2013) exhibition at Elipsis Gallery. In his third solo exhibition Dekor, Özcan questions social categorization of daily life; he interprets the social structures which classify citizens in the form of human, animal and plants in a surrealistic way. In Dekor there are arrangements that contain clues about how city life has been designed in the recent past. The contents of these arrangements consist of the materials collected from public and private archives, alongside the photographs taken by Özcan.
The exhibition includes also the work named Recipes No. 24, which was exhibited in Turkish Pavilion of the International Architecture Exhibition at the Venice Biennale in 2014. This work, which was produced within the scope of a collective project called Places of Memory, focuses on the daily life in a social housing project named Hukukçular Sitesi, designed by Haluk Baysal and Melih Birsel' between the years 1958-1967.
