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In the last few years Zehra Şonya has been working with the light. In her work, the space accepting her art work is, also, the place for reconciliation between natural reality and the artist’s spiritual being. Her installations with the bright boxes or light items made of light-weight materials, transparent paper, tulle etc., establish new relations between the borders or the given architecture of any space and introduce the spectator to an environment of evocative atmosphere, structured with continuous passages from darkness to light.

Her formative education in sculpting had early enough turned her attention to the plastic quality of light. She showed extreme sensitivity in making light the tool with which she started to intervene in the natural environment, and gave the meaning of metal-plastic energy within the structured environment to the language of sculpture. Zehra Şonya’s bright items function as light points, as fields where shapes, figures and pictures are formed, where primary fabrications spring from a natural and intellectual energy that is concentrated in a point. Her item space is both microscopic and macroscopic in relation to the rest of environment, where they stand. From inside each bright box the picture is seen in the process of appearing, as if it is still at some remote formation point of infinity. At the same time, the sum of bright signs she puts up in space multiply the connecting points among the light points, thus creating a place where multiple forms of life, both unconnected and different, from and different, from an energy field that may have no boundaries. In reality, she seems to construct a series of counterpoints among different bright points, which give a new spiritual identity to architectural space.

Having light as a toll, Zehra Şonya offsets the roots of an attitude opposite creative action, which are connected to the value of inner search. The contrasts and differences of the materials and intellectual elements that from the artistic language compose the base on which the process of their reconciliation or collision acquires intellectual substance in each art work. As far as she is concerned, language is a means of transporting cultural perception on the contrasts of reality. Using the light she forms the picture or the deeper meaning of life we meet in oriental thinking, in which the unity of differences and, mainly, of contrasts is the essence of philosophy. The vital importance of light presupposes the passage from darkness.

Respectively, western thought has approached the subject of contrasts from many sides, underling the appearance of unity within contrasts, as these exist in many structures of western culture: Heraclites’ axiom about the mutability of elements that lead to “everything is one” – Oedipus bringing to light the holy and unholy in his search for the truth which ends up in tragedy and redemption at the same time- the temple, which, according to Heideger, belong the architectural structure is the place where the relation between “birth and death, misfortune and good luck, victory and disgrace, perseverance and collapse” is established- while the light becomes building material in Byzantine architecture and unites the celestial world with the earthly one… All of these and many more light points in thought both in the east and in the west reveal the power of creation through the comprehension of contrasts as the ingredients of the search for unity.

Zehra Şonya’s bright work, a product of a daring course between the unlimited energy of her inner world and her experience from her limited action due to the social reality in which she lives, in Northern Cyprus, acquires ecumenical significance within the global political scene of our modern world, where awareness of the light inside the unity of contrasts still blacked out.

Efi Strousa

Art critic, curator President of AICA Hellas
August 2005