Josilda da Conceição is delighted to host a duo-solo exhibition, ‘Departure as Arrival’, featuring the installations and images of artists Martin La Roche and Emine Gündüz, departing from the concept of integration, bringing together the works from both artists to propose new perspectives.

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Martin La Roche presents installations and assemblages that explore the transformation of prior artworks into fragments for new pieces. Over the past year, La Roche has focused on shredding his personal archive, recycling a 10-year collection of exhibition materials, including brochures, sheets, and catalogs, as well as old rejected drawings. This process involves turning these documents into paper pulp while leaving some shredded fragments visible, creating new material for partitions and surfaces. In another work, La Roche opens Box N*1, containing a collection of drawings and little papers that the artist carried on his move from Chile to the Netherlands. He displays this collection by organizing its contents in a space defined by rulers with spatial measurement systems, such as a level or a centimetric scale, equating them with the perception of time and memories. A similar gesture happens in ‘Inventory’, an installation that is made with the content of previous boxes and collections of objects used by the artist in the past or ‘Crossworlds’ a composition with found newspaper crossword puzzles from different cultures. These works reflect the artist's interest in the importance of ephemera, leftovers, and fragments in constructing collective memory.

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The images of Emine Gündüz present a philosophical choreography between our tangible, material world of observation on one hand, and our eternal, inner world of experience on the other. The notion that we ‘live’ in ‘two worlds’, --as often stated by the artist, namely our inner and our outer world, is a focal point of departure in the works of Gündüz. By transforming photographic images, Gündüz performs a departure from the material world of surface and everyday life, to arrive at a transcendental continuum, where photographical images are transmuted into vessels for archetypal embodiments of psychological processes. A work titled ‘Spiritual Wasteland’ that depicts a dune landscape, is reworked with spray paint, to become a metaphor for a desolated desert. In another work, titled ‘Sun Forest’, a road, alongside a dark and dense forest, is illuminated with spray paint to reveal something of an allegorical trajectory of comprehension that comes from understanding of what was obscure to us, or, what we were unconscious of. In this way, Gündüz goes beyond the image of the material plane with the hope to find an archetypal world that says something about our universal journeys of renewal. Emine Gündüz is currently writing about Archetypes, the Unconscious and the process of Individuation.