Oceanic Feeling Vol I

In a letter he sent to his long-time correspondent friend Sigmund Freud in 1927, French writer Romain Rolland described the intense religious emotion he experienced as an “oceanic feeling” while talking about the story of Ramakrishna, an Indian religious leader who began to have ecstatic spiritual experiences at a young age. According to Rolland, this sense of oneness with the outside world was at the center of any religion, and even if this feeling was all a person felt, they could call themselves religious. 

 

The “oceanic feeling," which Freud later discussed at the beginning of his book “Civilization and Its Discontents” (1929), is central to the exploration of Sinem Ören, or Sören, the pseudonym she goes by in her art practice, of how languages and rituals are formed, investigating the experience of being human, and examining the line between “primitive” and "civilized.”. 

 

Sören’s ceramic works, which revolve around the concept of primitiveness and describe organic formations, deal with issues such as the birth of the universe we live in, our place in the world, birth, reproduction and death through identification with the universe and becoming one with it. In these works, where she creates her own mythology, the artist depicts sections of the reproductive cycle in the world she created and the habitats she imagines in a house pot. With her canvases depicting polychrome, polyphonic worlds in which various organisms, especially underwater creatures and fish, come together and her ceramics depicting plants and fungi trying to grow vertically through contrasts such as softness-hardness, fluidity-solidity, Sören both aims to make the viewer a part of the world she creates and to bring her existence and her mind to the collective consciousness.

 

Reference: Mamut Art Project 

Photographed by: Emir Uzun