Serap Tok: 'And the Days Began to Walk'
Collaboration, Curation
2022
Serap Tok's debut solo exhibition, And the Days Began to Walk, borrows its title from the Turkish translation of Eduardo Galeano's Children of the Days: A Calendar of Human History. Exhibited at İzmir's KARANTİNA Art Space from January 22 to February 11, 2022, the exhibition was the artist's first large-scale presentation, realized in collaboration with A Room of One's Own (KABO). Spanning painting, installation, and new paintings created in solitude during the pandemic, the show brought together work from Serap Tok's Dreams, Invisible Cities, and Dust series to form a multi-layered exploration of city rhythm and interiority.
At the heart of the exhibition was an investigation into the exchange between routine and revelation. In fragmented cityscapes and abstracted itineraries, Serap Tok's paintings charted the mental footprints of daily travels and repeated routes. The pandemic period pieces introduced a darker, inner world, pitting the quiet of isolation against the city's persistent heartbeat. This push-pull between contrary conditions resonated with Galeano's literary paradigm, which blends historical reflection and poetic observation, anchoring human experience within the passage of time.
The exhibition catalogue featured critical texts by artist and scholar Murat Özdemir and Serap Tok, along with a curatorial text titled Curator's Last Note. Together, these contributions situated the exhibition's thematic threads in terms of the conversation between personal narrative and shared memory. Exhibited at KARANTİNA, a venue involved in İzmir's contemporary cultural discussions, the exhibition bridged localized artistic dialogue with universal themes of temporality and belonging. In its pairing of literary reference with visual experimentation, And the Days Began to Walk was a meditation on the way that cities—and the selves within them—are continually rewritten by invisible rhythms.
