ORHAN TEKIN

"For Nietzsche, art represents a form of ‘truth’ (perhaps the highest form of truth available to human beings) in that; it discloses to individuals the sublime nature of their suffering, their pain, their foibles, and their failures. In this respect it enables them to continue to exist as moral beings in the face of the suffering and tragedy which characterize so much of the human existence of life. “Nietzsche holds that in the absence of the truth of art human beings are overtaken by moral nihilist, since suffering, cruelty, and so on, become unintelligible. Why do I suffer? Only when modern humanity feels the need for art will it become a spiritual humanity” (Pearson,1994, p.59).

There, people living in poverty and who had no option but to create the
environment and new tools for living could not by economic necessity, subscribe to accepted taste as it applied to possessions. Were they not then realising new value inherent in the materials they used? Were such people truly ‘weak’ because they were poor and unable to belong to affluent society or had their very poverty been a driving force in freeing them from tired, conventional values and thereby enabling them to become heroic? These questions formed the bedrock of my admiration of the poor and played a major role in my determination, as a sculptor."

Orhan Tekin, 2008