Ahu Dural | Objet d’Eileen, 2021

For HOT MESS, Ahu Dural will be exhibiting two sculptures, Objet d'Eileen and Auto Sun.


Objet d'Eileen is from a series of work that employs forms of modernist lamp designs by Eileen Gray as well as elements of large corporations.  She also combines these with geometric forms from her own imagination.  Partly technical/industrial, partly playful; drawing on themes of playgrounds, settlement aesthetics, form logos, these elements are transformed through an abstract and graphic language into an interplay of image surface, furniture object and sculpture.


Auto Sun, like many sculptures, is based on a more personal narrative. Dural's mother assembled microchips at a piece rate for two decades.  During her job interview, her manual skills were evaluated in front of an examiner using a simple test: she had to place 60 metal pins in a block with drilled holes in 60 seconds. Dural has turned this narrative into an open-ended series of different wooden cubes, where biographical data equates to the number of holes (eg. the age her mother started at a company; the age she ended the company work, the age she gave birth to her first child etc). 


Ahu Dural (*1984 in Berlin) is known for her large-scale installations, artist walks and collages. As the eldest daughter of Turkish immigrants, she grew up in Siemensstadt, a factory housing estate of Berlin's modernist era. Dural's work explores the interplay between biographies (with a focus on migrant women), architecture, and productive labor. After completing her studies in illustration at the Berlin University of the Arts, Dural expanded her artistic research in sculpture at the Academy of Arts Vienna. She completed her BA in 2014 (UdK Berlin) and graduated in 2016 in Vienna with Prof. Monica Bonvicini in Fine Arts. In 2022 she received the working grant for contemporary visual arts of the Senate Department for Culture and Europe. At the end of the year she will publish her first novel.