Doğu Özgün's "Night Rehearsal" focuses on strategies to reject and escape from the built identities imposed by micro and macro power centers around race, gender, species and class-based categories. The struggle to escape from the "houses" referred by these power centers can be expressed as a state of alertness by developing animal instinct against the anthropocene age. These strategies are reconstructed in Özgün's paintings based on the way they are seen as acts that are specific to the 'nature' of animals[1].

The name of the exhibition "Night Rehearsal" is inspired from the idea that the desires and deviations that are lurked during the day come in sight at the pitch darkness of the night; and this refers to the design of a new dream, a plot or an organized plan only in the dark and reveal what daytime puts out of sight. The night rehearsal of a game to be staged is the escape plan of the person who survives the costume he wears during the day.

The exhibition is an attack on promises of happiness, age / gender-specific teachings and memorized future plans that depend on the approval of majority. The works try to leave the gender roles (“The Coward House”, 2019), the pragmatic diplomacy of power (“Tik-Tok”, 2019), the hypocritical advocacy of morality (“Sterile House”, 2018) and the direct connection between properties and personal will (“Dale Cooper”, 2019).

The creatures in the pictures are neither animals nor human beings, neither belong to the day, nor to the night, they are neither what they really look like, nor just pretenders dressed in costumes. The exhibition finds competition between rational intelligence and instincts unfair, and takes advantage of the ambiguity between destruction and reconstruction.

In parallel with the production style of Özgün, sculptures ("Saddle", 2020) and fragrance placement, as well as penture, examine the forms of taming relationship established by man himself and nonhuman animals.

Photography by: Nazlı Erdemirel