Haluk Akakçe: They Call It Love, I Call It Madness

Haluk Akakçe brought his work, They Call It Love, I Call It Madness, to Deitch Projects for a special 2-week limited presentation from February 8 - 24, 2007. Originally created for Las Vegas’s Viva Vision, the world’s largest video screen suspended 90 feet above Fremont Street and stretching 1500 feet--the length of four city blocks, the animated artwork was presented by Creative Time every night in November 2006. A publication, Sky is the Limit, produced by Creative Time Books, was launched at a reception for the artist at Deitch Projects on February 23. It features documentation of the project in Las Vegas; an interview with Haluk Akakçe, Jane and Louis Wilson, and curator Peter Eleey; an essay by Alex Farqhuarson; and images of past works from the artist.

Akakçe, who often stages a confrontation between technology and organic life in his films and installations, created a visual meditation on the surreal belief in limitless promise and the power to change one’s destiny suggested by gambling and Las Vegas itself. They Call It Love, I Call It Madness was an electric painting constructed as an abstract ballet piece featuring virtual objects moving between the mechanical and the abstract across a stage in which many stories were happening at once, all in the same image. The work was produced in collaboration with Glassworks Ltd., a pioneering London-based computer animation and effects firm, and featured a soundtrack by Dan Donovan. The work was reconfigured into a vertical format for its presentation at Deitch. This was Akakçe’s second exhibition at Deitch Projects.

In his paintings, projections, and installations, the power of the digital to enhance experience coexisted with a searching for a primeval past or a utopian future. According to art critic Alex Farquharson, Akakçe opened a view into “a world of seemingly endless possibility… where it seem one may become anything simply by believing in its possibility.”

Born 1970, in Ankara, Turkey, and educated at Bilkent University, Ankara, and the Art Institute of Chicago, Akakçe had solo exhibitions in numerous venues around the world, including the Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria, New York; Centro Nazionale per le Arti Contemporanee, Rome; Platform Contemporary Art Center, Istanbul; P.S. 1 Contemporary Arts Center, New York; The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Connecticut; and Künst-Werke, Berlin. In 2000, Akakçe participated in Creative Time’s billboard project, DNAid, with a billboard presenting a digital still from his video The Measure of All Things.

Sky is the Limit was originally presented in partnership with the City of Las Vegas Art Commission and the Fremont Street Experience. The publication is sponsored by the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority.