Izmir Museum

Digital Touch to Analog (in Turkish, "Analoga Dijital Dokunuş") was a group exhibition at the İzmir Painting and Sculpture Museum, hosted in the İzmir Kültür Sanat Fabrikası. Curated by Esra Özkan and coordinated by Dr. Nabat Garakhanova, it was organised by DİSAD, the Turkish Digital Art Association, with Mezo Digital and with the contribution of the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism. The show looked at how artists use digital tools and techniques to reinterpret the analog world, setting AR, VR, NFT and kinetic works alongside painting and sculpture.

Federico Clapis was one of thirteen Turkish and international artists in the exhibition, together with, among others, Begüm Çelik, David Szauder, Muse VR and NastPlas. The official poster and the photographs point to one of his digital sculptures: a cracked, terracotta-like female figure wearing a VR headset, her hands held around an invisible object, standing on a stone plinth inside an arched niche. In the darkened, blue-lit galleries of the museum the work was shown as a tall vertical screen, in a sequence of backlit panels that also included a digital reinterpretation of a Renaissance profile portrait.

The exhibition's theme sits close to the core of Clapis' practice, which moved from physical sculpture to works that exist primarily in digital form. Presenting a virtual statue with the weight and surface of an ancient artefact inside a public museum of painting and sculpture made that passage between analog and digital visible, and brought his work to an audience in western Turkey.

Sources

• Dijital ve analog dünya sergide buluşuyor — Türkiye Gazetesi