600 Artworks from the Ömer Koç Collection, 400 Artists

The first private collection exhibition of Ömer Koç at Arter, curated by Selen Ansen, Farz Et Ki Sen Yoksun takes its title from a line in Ömer Khayyam’s Rubailer. In this exhibition, 600 works and 400 artists tell a polyphonic story, with each work finding its own path.

Ege Işık Özatay
“Since this worldly business has no end. Consider yourself already deprived and live free.” In his Ruba’i, Omar Khayyam says that freedom is only possible through the elimination of the self. Khayyam leaves aside all the worries and troubles of the world, which Carl Sagan describes as a “pale blue dot”, and turns to the present and the inner journey. Those who read the line “Everyone’s path leads to himself, don’t look elsewhere” take a deep breath and relax, the endless sounds, appearances and competitions suddenly come to an end.

Now everyone returns to their essence. Khayyam also uses “x” to describe the unknown. He explores not only the mathematics of life but also algebra, medicine, physics, astronomy and higher mathematics. Khayyam defined algebra as the science that aims to determine numerical and geometric unknowns.

Farz Et Ki Sen Yoksun, Curator: Selen Ansen, View from the exhibition, Arter, 2024
Photo: Orhan Cem Çetin

It is no coincidence that the title of Ömer Koç’s first private collection exhibition at Arter, Farz Et Ki Sen Yoksun, is inspired by a line in Ömer Khayyam’s Rubailer. In this magnificent exhibition, which I had the opportunity to visit during the press meeting on January 18th, 600 works and 400 artists tell a polyphonic story, with each work finding its own path. The exhibition is as wide-ranging in terms of the diversity of the works and objects that meet the audience as it is in terms of the media it covers and the themes it relates to. The exhibition presents a unique and idiosyncratic narrative, just like Omar Khayyam’s perspective on the world.

The intimacy of the ordinary with the extraordinary
Curated by Selen Ansen, the exhibition titled “Suppose You Don’t Exist” explores the affinities established between different objects as a result of a collector’s dreams and realizations, and the possibilities of moving the body created from the home to the museum as a space. Featuring the works of nearly 400 artists as well as anonymous works, mass productions and miscellaneous items, the exhibition spreads across the 4th and 3rd floor galleries of Arter. Organized to accompany a singular life in a private space, the selection, which is opened to the public from a personal collection through the mediation of an art institution and a curatorial perspective, creates a world between times and forms that defies the logic of classification.

This world, in which the collector acquires an abstract identity in interaction with the works, opens the door to an experience that is both real and fictional, as things leave the private sphere and maintain their originality in a new context. By treating the collection as a multifaceted and living body, “Pretend You Don’t Exist” encourages us to think about the intimacy of the ordinary with the extraordinary, as well as the practice of collecting and the objects that surround our everyday lives.

Farz Et Ki Sen Yoksun, Curator: Selen Ansen, View from the exhibition, Arter, 2024
Photo: Orhan Cem Çetin

Created with selected artworks from the Ömer Koç Collection, Farz Et Ki Sen Yoksun (Suppose You Don’t Exist) seeks to find spaces of ascension and escape in the universe of living beings, where mortality reigns, in order to dream of ascension in a world where everything has fallen and continues to fall. In the lines from which the exhibition takes its title, the poet Omar Khayyam (1048-1131) reminds us to freely embrace life by transcending the boundaries of our own selves, and visitors are invited to an experience that will open the door to new searches for meaning in the objects brought together in a spatial setting without chronology and hierarchy.

Bringing together books, armchairs, paintings, sculptures and photographs that carry us human pleasures, desires, aspirations and dreams of past lives through an accumulation that reflects the playful interpretation of the collector, Pretend You Don’t Exist pursues themes such as passionately approaching the idea of preserving all the transferable states of being human, good and bad, and finally gestures, allusions, movements, traces left undead and then found and preserved by the living, from the most sublime to the most mundane, from the most permanent to the most ephemeral. The thousands of works and objects that come together in the exhibition open up a vital field of vision for new associations through their intimacy in space.