Rodeo is very happy to announce SAMPLE SALE/ 2010 BC the first solo exhibition by Banu Cennetoğlu. This exhibition by Cennetoğlu plays with the possibilities in the production of art, the system of the art market and acts as an ironic gesture within her own practice, while at the same time it is expanding the traditional limits of exhibition making. SAMPLE SALE / 2010 BC will ‘sample’ new works that will be for sale from September 14 until November 20.

Cennetoğlu’s work for the 2009 Venice Biennial’s Turkish Pavillion, CATALAOG was a book which displayed four hundred and fifty-one photographs, offered to visitors to download for free via a website and a system of codes throughout the course of the exhibition. When the biennial was over the website closed while the book remains as a documentation of the performance. This work challenged the idea of an artist’s book as something exclusive, the idea of a catalogue as a classification mechanism of images or products, and of photography as a collectible medium.

In SAMPLE SALE/ 2010 BC, Cennetoğlu is presenting a group of works that brings together the artist’s recent and distant past and also opens new areas in her practise. The main wall of the gallery is used to display all the works while the reception desk relocates to the exhibition space and the gallery’s staff provide visitors with information on the sales conditions of each piece. Each sample on the wall is juxtaposed with one CATALOG. In reference to complementarity and its economical, formal and contextual consequences, the artist constructs a power game betwen her previous and new work .

A maxim composed of found brass letters originally produced for different institutional and commercial signs dominates the wall and an apotropaic fake Swarovski emblem protects the space and the show. A group of photos selected and printed by the gallerist herself, a video produced with all the images posted between July 2010 and December 2006 on the popular photo blog I Heart Photograph, a shelf with the artist’s souvenirs from her visits to Murcia, (the upcoming Manifesta 8, in which Cennetoğlu will participate with a new commissioned piece), are some of the works in the exhibition. Another sample, 20.08.2010, is a collection of the local newspapers printed in Turkey in one day and bound in seven volumes. The work is extended to a reading area which is physically connected to the new reception counter and CATALOG display.

The works in this show draw on Cennetoğlu’s practice as an artist, a producer of artists’ books and the founder of the only printed matter space in Istanbul, BAS. References to Hans Peter Feldmann, Documentation Céline Duval, Sol LeWitt and John Baldessari relate to the artist’s interest in a conceptual treatment of the image and its immense framing possibilities.