Ayşe Kırca : Hype

In an era where social media dominates communication, we are faced with the reality that global hype guides our actions, routines, thought processes, and even our emotions.

Whatever the hype is, this unconditional adaptation dulls our sense of responsibility, lulling us into a state of complacency, while also granting us the freedom to set our minds aside and join the zombie herd. This freedom is superficial, comparable to the freedom of an aquarium fish that eats every piece of food it is given, because it means abandoning the ability to take initiative and surrendering to society.

This hype-driven behavior is so powerful that we can see the bride’s father dancing with his daughter to Gangnam Style at a wedding in Anatolia, a child stealing his mother’s surgery money to buy the latest phone, and parents putting their newborn baby on display in a store as an object of interest to gain the approval of the hype-driven society by getting more clicks… This behavioral hype addiction can be seen as somewhat innocent at one point because it is a more outward and action-oriented behavior; it contains animalistic rudeness, a thoughtless and random attitude. However, emotional hype adaptation appears before us as a deeper, dark loss of consciousness. While saying we will conform to the herd, we unconsciously silence the voice of our own hearts and listen to the millions who vocalize it. In a world where hundreds of children die every day under bombs, our focus as humanity, directing all our empathy and compassion towards a monkey subjected to violence, is probably a manifestation of this emotional hype captivity.

This exhibition describes the hype that enslaves us, from fashion to technology use, from daily habits to aesthetic concepts, and even our deepest emotions, and the modern human who has reverted to a monkey in order to adapt to them. Expected to build character and cognition on the path to becoming Homo sapiens, and to overcome herd mentality with their mental world as they distance themselves from animals, humans seem to have surrendered to the herd again with this hype frenzy and reversed their evolution. This exhibition is a bitter reflection of this reality.

Doğu Demirkol