"Aesthetics of the constituted is more real than that of the existing." This is the last phrase in Beril Or's text about her work "Mid." The reason we begin with this phrase is because we believe it to be an extract of Or's artistic practice.
In "Mid" Beril Or aims at drawing people's attentions to plastic items we encounter unawares transiently on the streets by framing them. The places she indicates are gathered together in a photo-book and carried to the exhibition space. For Or who studied sculpture, photography is a way of carrying the images she thinks as sculptural textures, apart from being photographs themselves. Moreover, transferring the representation of some area on the street can bear a stronger meaning. The imagery transformed into photography takes on a different significance in terms of the place it stands. So, it intensifies the reality and awareness Beril Or tries to convey.
In fact, the book is a part of the exhibition under the same name in Torun. The other part of the exhibition consists of a 90-minute video-installation named "t.b." in which we can watch a passage inside Bolu Tunnel. Or presents the 3 minute passage she took to go to Ankara when she was studying in İstanbul by slowing it down to make it more observable. Another installation in the exhibition is "yer." She tries to break the immobility of photographs via three different slide machines to reflect the city's dynamic and bustling structure. These works also bring Beril Or's practice into light in a more clear way: Plastic structures in life and their becoming more observable.
It is said and can also be confirmed by testing that the human eye cannot function perpetually when it scans its environment, the gaze moves through some space in continuous leaps. To maintain the gaze nonstop is like impossible. Beril Or in her work "t.b." makes those leaps, stops impossible. In this manner, the work is very tense, preventing the viewer's gaze to leap, miss the details, forcing the viewer to look. "Mid" in which she gathers the plastic items, also relates to "t.b." by serving as a similar act of "forcing the look."