vanitas vanitatum

Death is the catalyst for art, philosophy, and perhaps every culture ever created by humanity. The consciousness of our mortality permeates the very essence of these cycles of creation and destruction. This awareness bestows significance upon the fleeting nature of time and molds the actions of individuals grappling with its inevitability. Man's relationship with the expansive sky above and the solid earth beneath his feet falls short of providing him to find the meaning of his existence in this world. Under the same sun, with an ever-deepening sense of disharmony, the words that the winds blowing, the rivers flowing, the words spoken and the heroes we come across again and again have finally whispered in our ears for thousands of years; Memento Mori…

"Memento Mori," or "Remember Death," serves as the fundamental message behind Vanitas paintings, aiming to expose the futile endeavors of human beings within the fleeting existence of the universe. In this realm, conflicts and contradictions intertwine, leaving us unable to attain the sought-after meaning. Originating in 17th-century Dutch painting, this message openly expresses the ephemeral nature of the world and the notion that everything ultimately becomes futile and devoid of meaning.

However, even in order to make sense of all this, it is necessary to take into account the history of religions and the class situation of Europe, as well as the stage of capitalism at that time.

While human beings aim to remember death with Vanitas painting or to live without forgetting it, they take the social stratification, religion and sects they have created against nature and death as a shield even to reveal this. So even to have a Vanitas painting, it is necessary to have class and religious privileges.

In Vanitas painting, where the canvas is used almost like an altar; gold and silver luxury items, objects that evoke time and ephemerality, spiral-shaped objects that symbolize cyclicity, globes and world representations, newly extinguished candles, and skulls representing death, which are indispensable for every painting, are used. On this altar, death is presented with luxury objects and arrogance…

My work called Vanitas Vanitatum was created based on Vanitas paintings as a discourse. The compositions used in the Vanitas painting were not created this time with luxury objects or status symbols, but with wastes hitting the shore of Lake Van. Both the amount and variety of the wastes that washed ashore on a short coastline of about 2 kilometers were astonishing. I picked them up during my walks. In my work, I tried to adapt the Vanitas painting tradition's message of nothingness, time and futility, which reached today from centuries ago, to today's consumption habits and the conflicting relationship of human beings with nature through these wastes.