Lal Batman’s first solo exhibition in Germany “The Floor is Lava” is now open at Anna Laudel Düsseldorf. Drawing inspiration from popular playground games, the exhibition can be visited until February 4th, 2024. Inspired by common children’s games played in schoolyards, the exhibition exceeds beyond the innocence of childhood games, to delve into complex themes such as ridden anxiety, impending catastrophes, and haunting memories which one is faced with throughout adulthood. Through her art, Batman aims to explore the multifaceted aspects of the human psyche and the anxieties that can manifest as people transit from childhood to adulthood.
“This exhibition will make you feel like your feet were swept off the ground.”
Says Lal Batman about her first solo exhibition in Germany, Düsseldorf, which includes artworks that will be unveiled to meet the audience for the first time and differ distinctly in style and format from her previous oeuvres. The artist creates a conglomerate of futuristic landscapes, underworld scenarios, and fantastic imagery in her sculptural and video works reflecting the vast range of mental states we experience. All the while she maintains a witty and ironic distance from the narrative content.
Batman’s self-composed soundtracks which highly resemble ASMR, induce trance-like states in the audience, making them feel immobilized by the screen. The sculptures in the exhibition, with their preposterous size and mass, mirrors the bizarre, grotesque and also sinister games of childhood, obstructing the audience’s movement in the exhibition space.
Batman’s artistic practice also concerns the age of accelerating digitalization and our interaction with social media. She parallels this reality, this meta-world, in her own work by alluding to the search for security, affirmation, relationships and expectations we foster by doing so. She vividly communicates the human psyche’s need for love, tenderness and harmony as well as the irresistible fascination for evil, horror and destruction.
The audience will move through the exhibition more like crossing a floor transforming meter by meter into lava, drawing people in and out of perilous yet intriguing dreams or nightmares.
Lal Batman’s work, presented for the very first time in Germany, can be seen in the playful and daring exhibition “The Floor is Lava” until February 4th 2024 at Anna Laudel Düsseldorf.
Address: Mühlenstraße 1, 40213 Düsseldorf/Germany
Opening Hours: Closed on Sundays and Mondays
Tuesdays – Fridays: 12pm / noon– 6pm
Saturdays: 11am – 3pm (or by appointment)
Lal Batman
Lal Batman was born in 2001 in Bursa and spent her childhood moving between her hometown and Istanbul. She attended a high school with a fine arts focus and upon graduating went on to study Plastic and Fine Arts at Yeditepe University (Istanbul). Throughout her studies she participated in curatorial projects, workshops, symposia and panels in Europe, Asia and South America. For instance the “IVth International Athens Art Symposium by UNESCO”, 2017 (Athens), an exhibition at “Boris Gorgiev and Varna City gallery”, 2017 (Varna), the “Repeat All Short Film Festival”, 2017 (Shumen), an exhibition at Galerie Da Vinci Art (Paris) and a project at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum, 2018 (Tokyo). In 2017, Lal Batman was invited by Prof. Valeri Hristov Chakalov to attend the international film festival “Repeat All” organized by the Technological Education, Business and Visual Art Department of the Konstantin Preslavsky University of Shumen. In the context of the festival she received an award for her work.
Lal Batman developed an interdisciplinary and multi-layered practice throughout her accelerating artistic career. Engaging with concepts that tie art and design together in their evolution over time, her visual language changed from more figurative representations to a more abstract style. Nonetheless the artist’s work retains a playful and often witty note. Batman’s perception of art and design is also of significance in terms of the relationship between space, artwork and audience she aims to create. Using video art, digital manipulation, digital illustration, sculpture and painting, Batman transforms her perspective on reality and its intrinsic volatile into complex pieces of art.
Invited by the Faculty of Arts, Design and Architecture of MEF University (Istanbul)as a guest coordinator for their yearly workshop week in 2017, Lal Batman examined autonomous features of art and architecture practices as well as independent studios, that make use of the interrelationships of interdisciplinary networks. She coordinated the group exhibition “Love over Entropy” at Anna Laudel gallery in Istanbul in 2020. In 2021 she started a multi-media based research project with curator and sociologist Ebru Yetiskin, a collective process resulting in exhibitions across 250 former theatre and opera houses in Belgrade, as well as the artist’s solo exhibition “Exposé” at Anna Laudel gallery in Istanbul (February 2022).
In 2023 Anna Laudel represented her in a solo booth at Zonamaco, Mexico City. The booth was mentioned on Art news as one of the top ten booths of this fair´s edition. The artist lives and works between Istanbul (Turkey) and Belgrade (Serbia).
Anna Laudel
Anna Laudel was founded in 2012 and is now located in the heart of Beyoğlu, Gümüşsuyu in Istanbul. Since the opening of the gallery, Anna Laudel has been striving to become one of the leading dynamic contemporary art centres in Istanbul, yet to also represent a wide range of artists, in terms of social and cultural background, age and of course in terms of artistic styles and media. Founded by Anna Laudel with the intention of promoting Turkish emerging as well as established artists, but also a selection of international artists with for instance German or Italian backgrounds, the gallery developed a strong stance in the art world under the direction of Ferhat Yeter.
Istanbul, a city spreading across two continents, an international metropolis, where not only East meets West, but also many different cultures coexist, is both a thriving and constantly evolving environment for a gallery seeking to extend their artists to a diverse audience. Following its first location in Istanbul, Anna Laudel opened its second gallery in Düsseldorf (Germany) in 2019 to further its international outreach. Soon after, in May 2022, a third gallery was inaugurated in Bodrum, Turkey, in Zai Yaşam, allowing for yet another audience and an interesting location to host mostly solo exhibitions. The gallery established a large audience around its locations of Bodrum, Istanbul and Düsseldorf, in recent years also gained further recognition internationally by participating in various high-tier art fairs.