By Heidi Trautmann

The button as a symbol, the button as a key to unbutton the pages of history. What do we wear underneath? What is hidden underneath the coat of respectability of society, of a country?

This question is researched by the artists, the graphic designers Gürkan Gökasan and Selma Gürani in their joint exhibition at the ArtRooms in The House from March 22 to 04 April 2014.

There is a bitter truth in it, in whatever we do, we cannot not shake off our past, it will keep coming up. There is another truth in it, as Oya Silbery, the gallerist, says in her introduction….’These memories – East, West, Germany, Turkey, Iran or Japan, it makes no difference – are the dirty, bitter, toxic memories piled up by the power addicts who control the political power, using them heavy-handedly and snidely to maintain their reign and which they dress up with pompous rhetoric…”  It seems that his exhibition comes just at the right time to admonish that all these things can appear on our horizons any time or… are already in the making. We don’t have to look far.

The buttons are attached there where the wounds are, where connections, interrelations can be tied; art works full of symbolic language, developed digitally. The war in Somalia, the disaster in Chernobyl,  the Syrian children in refugee camps playing hopscotch, the children dying of hunger in Africa, and one very symbolic story of girls being sold like cows on the market…. and the Cyprus problem: they all have something in common, the buttons as symbol, buttons to close and disclose.

The whole exhibition, from room to room is an art installation, with the wire fence around a once lived in place with the atomic warning sign attached; with texts on the walls, on the floor, with symbols leaving the picture saying the story does not end here, it continues, be aware, the pigeons of peace leave the place…

The texts very poetic… “Her dreams were crushed at her feet, earlier than she expected, ever since she could walk, her father calculated how many bovines she was worth”. ….. “He took the stone on the ground, threw it at his reflection in the mirror” …..or the words from Anne Frank’s diary, they touch deeply.

A well prepared exhibition, a well done catalogue, the two artists understand their language.

However, I have not found the LOST BUTTON; will we have to go on looking for it outside the exhibition rooms?