Royar (Where the sun rises) 2023
26.5 - 24.6.2023
Opening: 26.05.23, 5 - 7 pm
For her first solo exhibition at Galleri Tom Christoffersen, Aia Sofia Coverley Turan presents sculptures and drawings that all circle the complicated and vague emotions connected with origins, memory, and trauma – individual as well as collective. Several of the works such as the sculptures Leyla and Abla picture the ambivalent position of simultaneously being in a state of windy movement and at a standstill. The works are consistently created in displacements of scales that point towards their background of blurred memories and incomplete stories.
Aia Sofia Coverley Turan is interested in how cultural lore, language, and narratives shape a person. She works continuously with the relations between the alienated and the intimate. The work series Learning Language consists of three blackboards created with patinated bronze plates and drawings in pastel and chalk. They are based on conversations with elder generations who experienced no longer being allowed to speak Kurdish in school. On one blackboard, a Kurdish poem of unknown origin is written, now translated into Danish like a communication across language. Memories, mentalities, and experiences can wander through generations. You can fight or you can fly. The exhibition expresses the incomprehensible and lets new stories appear. The works are formed by fragmented glimpses of memories from childhood games and sensorial remembrances that follow the artist like the water is affected by the wind; ripples on the surface spreading out, alternately enhancing, and fading away.
- Kathrine Børlit Nielsen
Aia Sofia Coverley Turan (1994, DK) graduated from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2019. She has studied at Accademia de Belle Arti Perugia in Italy and taught children and young people in sculpture at a variety of schools. She is now teaching at Kulturskolerne in Taastrupgård. She has exhibited her works at Den Frie, Simian, Four Boxes, Arcway Nightlands Connector, and KØS Museum of Art in Public Space, among others. Aia Sofia Coverley Turan’s works are part of Copenhagen Municipal’s collection, and she has done commissioned work for Dansk Industri.
Learning language, 2023
Sproget er svært, landet ligger langt væk, såret sidder dybt i sjælen, 2023
Five stone game, 2023
Abla (Sister) , 2023