Is It You Joe is a long-term project conceived in 2015. Joe is a fictional character who appears from time to time, unexpected, whenever it pleases him. Joe can also very easily modify his appearance: the shape or material Joe appears in is always unique, never to be repeated (only the title of the series is unchanged). In this case, Joe and his “family” is shown as stick figures: this motif reflects on HALITI's earlier “IKEA-bag” series (from which Nihal is also part of the collection and exhibition) while their design evokes the world of advertising, including banners. In a self-ironic manner, the artist uses Joe's alter ego as a tool to respond to the rather fast-paced capitalism; Haliti approaches the question primarily from the artists' viewpoint, referring to the fact they are constantly in the loop of working fast and under the obligation to follow the market’s request to constantly reinvent themselves. All this is formulated in Joe's way: at the LISTE 2016 in Basel, Haliti made Joe appear in the form of countless trendy figures, implying that he has been willing to enter the international art market at any price. So Joe can be seen as a part of the artistic creative process.
Borbála Kálmán
Related content
Westkunst - Ostkunst. A Selection from the Collection 1. August, 2017 – 26. January, 2020
The newly set collection display makes attempts to present emphatic points not only in well-organised chronological order or along stylistic features, but to examine the characteristics, consonances, differences as well as the artistic-cultural parallels between Western and Eastern art.