Aslı Seven

[masliseven]

Uses and Misuses of Arte Útil: The Archive, The Conversations and The Institutional Scale

This essay was commissioned by the Office of Useful Art at Salt, Istanbul and published on SALT.TXT in October 2018

Art in Use: Case Studies From Turkey was a two-day workshop organized by SALT’s Office of Useful Art and run by independent curators/researchers Gemma Medina and Alessandra Saviotti, working with the Association de Arte Útil. Around 25 people participated at the workshop, ranging from artists, architects, curators, and students interested in the concept of Useful Art and in reviewing the Turkish cases that were selected by Onur Yıldız and Naz Kocadere from SALT Research and Programs. The following is an attempt at documenting this experience as it unfolded over two days, while at the same time shedding light on some critical questions that arose from our exchanges.

I. Arte Útil as an Archive in Use

In its current state, Arte Útil presents itself in the form of an online archive of artistic projects selected on the basis of their public utility. It is therefore worth considering what an archive is and what it does when it takes artistic forms. Archives operate through selection, indexation, and regulation. The archival reason is one of representation; it operates partly in withdrawal from the real through frames for selection and accumulation, with one eye looking to the past and one eye looking toward the future, determining what can be said and seen, in a prefiguration of what is to come, based on its own predicaments. Therein lies the curse and the promise of the archive. On the one hand, the archive is a tool of power. It is the site for pinning down historical and/or scientific truths and, as such, it produces and reproduces the narratives of those in power. On the other hand, the archive can also be a tool for resistance and disruption. It can become the site where the residual transforms into a reserve for action and change, and where the narratives of those that are repressed and/or marginalized can be articulated.

Browsing through the web-based platform of Arte Útil, which gathers around 300 projects with a relatively wide geographic scope, one cannot help but notice the indexation itself more than the projects that are being classified. Spread across the categories of urban development, science, pedagogy, politics, economy, environment and social work, the indexation collapses all the classified projects together into a surface composed of initiators, short project descriptions, goals, beneficial outcomes, and an identifiable set of users. At first sight, the Arte Útil Archive seems like a frame that reveals its own operation of framing but conceals its process and that of the projects it holds together. For this reason, instead of focusing on the archive itself as an enclosed entity to critically evaluate its actual use, I suggest that we conceptualize it as an index, a trace that points to larger processes at work outside the archive’s limits, and that cannot be completely contained in the archive itself. In other words, to reverse the question that Arte Útil poses about the world of artistic initiatives and their uses, and to scrutinize the potential usefulness of the archive itself.

In the essay ‘10 Thesis on the Archive’, Shaina Anand – the co-initiator of the online pad.ma archive – argues against the reduction of archives to the particular forms that they take and opts instead for an active and creative approach. Anand argues that the archive is not a representational but creative tool and states that “the naming of something as an archive is not the end, but the beginning of a debate.”1 To properly assess the value of the Arte Útil archive – and the value of conceptually binding art and use together in a more general sense – we need to balance our critical take on the archival index by looking at its uses, deployment, and activations. In other words, and taking Anand’s lead, we need to ask: What conflicts and contradictions does the Arte Útil archive hold and reveal?

II. Conversations On Art and Use in Turkey

SALT’s Office of Useful Art is an open space, making room for working stations and collective discussions around an agora-like seating arrangement. It’s a place of circulation where the collective discussions might infect individual working stations and vice-versa. As we took our respective positions in and around this agora, a series of questions were already emerging in my mind: What is the place of collective discussion and collective action within the Arte Útil archive? How to select what’s useful and for whom? At what scale(s)?

The debates we had during the workshop Art in Use: Case Studies From Turkey centered on the presentation and collective evaluation of a series of 20 cases researched and selected by Onur Yıldız and Naz Kocadere - which, as a constituent process in itself, is significant in terms of an archive that works through activations. Confronting these projects with potential user narratives about them was one of the most interesting moments of the workshop. One area of criticism was the absence of user narratives within the archival index, which, if included, could potentially liberate the projects themselves from the burden of utility and put the emphasis on how users take hold of any given ‘tool’ in a multiplicity of ways that might not be foreseen or calculated by the initiators of the projects. Furthermore, the inclusion of user narratives was proposed as a way to make the online archive more accessible, transparent, and readable.

Another interesting moment came as the workshop participants appropriated the 8 criteria of Arte Útil in their collective discussions, questioning the conceptual grounding of these criteria in relation to the cases from and context of Turkey, and emphasizing the need for context-specific re-evaluations against the archival index. As one of my discussion partners argued for the importance to see whether or not a project creates new models of operation that could be applicable elsewhere, I thought the idea of creating a ‘model’ would contradict the criteria of 1:1 scale, but fit the rules when it comes to challenging its field of operation.

My own extra-sensitivity to authorship surprised me. Disciplinary boundaries seemed to provoke debate: Can Loading – an art center operating from and within the southeastern city of Diyarbakır, a context prone to highest political, ethnic and economic risks - be considered a useful art project if it is an art center, benefiting only the artists in Diyarbakır? Can we eschew the specificity and urgencies related to the context of Diyarbakır in answering such a question? Is the scope of a project such as Siyah Bant – which documents and discusses censorship cases in the Turkish art world, provides a network of support and disseminates information on how to legally handle such situations – exclusively limited to the art world, or can it, potentially, say something about the larger socio-political context and offer tools to deal with censorship within the existing legal framework, beyond contemporary art? To what extent can it be considered ‘artistic’? Can Kültürhane, a library-turned-education platform and cultural venue, founded in the southern city of Mersin by several recently dismissed academics for peace, really be considered a case of art if it only operates as an educational platform? What about the urgency of academics and of Higher Education as a whole in Turkey?

As we collectively walked to visit one of the Turkish projects recently added to the Arte Útil Archive, Özge Açıkkol – the co-founder of the artist collective Oda Projesi – mentioned her doubts about usefulness, considering Oda Projesi and the impossibility to know or to measure the use it may or may not have generated for the people it engaged. Once we arrived at Dünyada Mekân, a free co-working space and labor-solidarity network for freelancers and white-collar workers recently added to the Arte Útil archive, Zeyno Pekünlü welcomed us with a brief presentation. To the question why she had been reluctant to use her artistic legitimacy to raise funds for Dünyada Mekân, she answered poignantly that trying to pay the rent and doing the cleaning of the space is what makes you a collective, underlining thereby the importance to hold onto the value of collective action and struggle instead of taking the shortcut of artistic legitimacy.2

III. Matters of Scale

Arte Útil’s story is closely associated with the Museum of Arte Útil exhibition that was held at the Van Abbe Museum in 2013. In fact, that very exhibition is presented as the association’s founding moment. Physically transforming the museum building from the inside and the outside, the Museum of Arte Útil exhibition presented case studies of Useful Art, collected through a process of open call.3 The exhibition presented the first display of the association’s archive. It also openly asked the visitors to become active users of the museum, to take inspiration from the case studies, and to take ownership of the exhibition’s public programs by proposing various uses.4 In 2015, Medina and Saviotti initiated the workshop series Broadcasting the Archive and designed them as a response to local urgencies. Thereby, they made it possible for the archive to grow beyond and below art institutions.

This state of affairs presents us with several scales at work that define the space of action of Arte Útil and which need unpacking. These include the scale of a single artistic project in relation to its context, the scale of the archive as an active discursive system with its selection criteria and indexation, and the scale of various activations of the archive within temporal and spatial limits. The latter may come in the form of exhibitions, residencies, walking tours and workshops including the one at SALT. Lastly, operating not within the archive itself but tangentially, the institutional scale. Along with the Van Abbe Museum, several other institutions have initiated temporary Office(s) of Useful Art since 2013: Middlesborough Insitute of Modern Art (MIMA), the Queens Museum, Tate Liverpool. Each time an institution hosts Arte Útil within its space, both physically and in terms of its operations, research is carried out to expand the geographic and historical scope of the archive. The users are invited to take hold of the archive and participate in the rethinking of the institution’s relationship with its audiences. Furthermore, collective discussions are organized around the idea of art and its possible uses.

It is worth stepping outside of the Asociación de Arte Útil and its archive, to consider what it means for an institution to initiate an office of useful art. As SALT was initiating the Office of Useful Art in September 2017, “the potential of co-learning among the institution and its users” was stated as an investigation area.5 One of the most visible results of this investigation came in the form of ‘Researchers at SALT’ presentations. The institution scaled down towards its users and asked them what they were doing at SALT Galata, how they were using the institution’s online archives, and what their research projects were about. A series of public presentations took shape around the users of the building and its resources. These presentations served as a space for discussion where new institutional programming could emerge based on the initiatives of the users themselves, opening up a public discussion around ongoing academic and independent research. In addition, by making the research conducted through SALT’s resources public, they provided a user-led form of mediation and activation of the institution’s archives.

The research carried out thus far by SALT’s Office of Useful Art for cases from Turkey seems to aim at potential inclusion in the Arte Útil archive. In its second year of operation, starting from September 2018, the Office of Useful Art plans to expand its research to neighboring countries, such as Bulgaria and Armenia. While we collectively learn from discussing these cases in relation to their inclusion or exclusion from the archive, the final decision on whether or not a proposed project will be included in the archive remains unclear and the decision-making process far from transparent. With this in mind, I wonder whether it would, perhaps, be more productive to shift the focus from the Arte Útil Archive to the criticisms, new understandings and positions that emerge locally from these discussions. Or, to put it differently, to re-conceptualize the centralized, institutionalized understanding of the archive into something like a ‘nomadic tool’. This, I believe, would allow us to focus more on the conceptual challenge of thinking art and use together in a local context, from a historical point of view, and from the point of view of art institutions today.6

***

The Duchampian ‘coefficient of art’ is not a mere percentage to evaluate how ‘artistic’ a practice is. Rather, as Stephen Wright argues in the lexicon accompanying Arte Útil7, this key concept designates the difference between the maker’s intentions on the one hand, and what is expressed in the work as it meets the world, on the other. It captures the value of the unknowable and incalculable within the creative process which is understood as a collaboration between artist and audience, regardless of aesthetic quality. According to Duchamp himself, the expression goes beyond what we might call ‘high art’ and refers to “art in a raw state, that must be refined by the spectator.”8 In this sense, Duchamp lays the ground for thinking of the reception and the spectator’s subjectivity as contributors to the creative process itself. If we replace the word ‘spectator’ with the word ‘user’ in Duchamp’s writing, we can begin to understand ‘usership’ as co-creatorship in art, and partially erode concepts such as ‘authority’ and ‘authorship’. Putting the emphasis on usership and user narratives also allows for thinking ‘use’ together with ‘misuse’ and for approaching forms as collaborative processes, instead of projecting an intent of public utility upon the initiators and artistic forms taken in isolation from the processes of their reception and use.

Juxtaposing art and use, forcing one to think those two notions that are, in modernist terms, inherently contradictory, opens up the potential to create new concepts, to propose new perspectives, and to evaluate current and past art practices in a new light. Shifting toward an understanding of form as process allows for ‘co-authorship’ and ‘collaboration’ to emerge as central components of thinking about art and use through community-driven housing projects, neighborhood-lead ecological hubs or alternative pedagogical models. Furthermore, it is worth considering what it means for art to take on the mission of public utility and social change at a time when, globally, the public is retreating from welfare provision. Looking towards the future of Arte Útil, it is also worth questioning how this initiative might instigate infrastructural change for the projects it brings together, the institutions that host it and their economy.9

About one week prior to the workshop, I was reading Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval’s book Common. Essay on the Revolution in 21st Century, in which the authors draw a meticulous history and genealogy of concepts such as public good, commons, utility, property, and right to use. While I do think that, in its current form, the Arte Útil Archive suffers from a lack of conceptual clarity and a clear positioning within this dense history of concepts and their use, I also think, and I am indebted to Hannah Arendt in stating this, that in the putting together of our words and actions something interesting happens , that the value of Arte Útil lies in its provocation.

[masliseven]

Orifice (Inside)

Written to accompany Burcu Yagcioglu’s solo exhibition “Inside” held at Galerist, Istanbul between 13 September - 20 October.

“The metaphysical scandal of capital brings us to the broader question of the agency of the immaterial and the inanimate: the agency of minerals and landscape… and the way that “we” “ourselves” are caught up in the rhythms, pulsions and patternings of non-human forces. There is no inside except as a folding of the outside. The mirror cracks. I’m another, and I always was”[i]

Indigestion breeds complexity, you say. In microbiological terms, symbiogenesis[ii], the swallowing of one single-celled organism by another that fails to digest it, their continued resistance to each other and the process of their coexistence defines the emergence of new, complex life forms. Both organisms are transformed through the encounter and into something new, the first in trying to digest, the second, in resisting digestion. As in the world of physics, where form emerges from the encounter of opposing forces and their resistance, in biology too, resistance to digestion – or indigestion to be accurate - is the breeding ground of complex forms. Resistance is the first thread here that runs through the exhibition. Not only because it defines the emergence of a new form - the evolutionary process - as a collective process of co-agency as opposed to competition, but also because resistance creates energy. If we move on from the materiality of bodies to modern human consciousness, resistance also stands at the threshold of that permeable repressive barrier between what we conceive as solid, visible, tangible and categorizable, and the subconscious realm, where the ambiguous, unformed matter, inert or animate, gesticulates, where things like contamination and infection occur, where form is in process of potential emergence or dissolution. As such, resistance – and it could be said of indigestion – also breeds imagination. Do we ever give form to anything without taking form in return?

The second thread comes from the understanding that we, as humans, are one composite life form. Born from the encounter of multiple organisms trying to swallow and digest one another, becoming hosts for indigested organisms shred into pieces but resisting digestion, we are an assemblage and we are multiple. Regardless of naturalized knowledge categories, we are made of bacteria as much as we are of language and representation, of minerals and sunlight. This principle of assemblage runs through your compositions in content and form, as you cut and literally interweave background and figure into a composite, moving texture of found images and drawings of membranes, organs, tools, secretions and food, landscapes and minerals, all leveled on the same playing field. Our selfhood, the acclaimed conscience of self of the individual, along with the primacy of human agency, is but a narrative from this point of view. So is the autonomy and unity of our body as a form:

One head,

a torso,

two arms

two legs.

Lest we forget, we are born out of an orifice. Our sexual desire and reproduction center on orifices. We sustain our life through an orifice, because we eat, but also, the distinctively human trait, we talk and we create social bonds to survive. 

There is no inside except as a folding of the outside.  

The mouth, the orifice of profound physical impulses[iii] - digestive, sexual, linguistic organ, is the place where our ingestions and secretions begin. It’s the locus of breath. It’s a cavity. It’s a cave where all sorts of substance exchange between our “self”, our “inside” and the others, the “outworldly” occurs. To swallow the world whole, or to be swallowed, to turn our insides out, to fold the outside in, with our teeth, our tongue, our lips.

As we look through the orifice, corporeal autonomy becomes a fiction. Here, we are prone to ebbs and flows, liquids and lubrication, reflexes – involuntary reactions – and pulsions. The disgraceful, but matter-of-fact connection between the mouth and the anus comes to mind, and echoes through the Technicolor esthetics of 1970s food photography found in popular magazines: no matter what the frame is, the viscous, sticky matter always borders on abjection. In contrast, when the abject is repressed so we can praise the deadly autonomy of pure form, we are met by the tight constipation of a strictly human attitude, the magisterial look of the face with a closed mouth, as beautiful as a safety deposit box[iv].

Open your mouth.

Do you think that digestion is the body’s subconscious?

When you first spoke to me of fermentation, I was thinking of

our Mother Tongue, in agglutination.

Almost every expression, every word, holds together multiple meanings. With every added suffix, all the previous ones and the root are digested into a new meaning, while at the same time resisting the total meaning. I was thinking that

our Mother Tongue,

because it unfolds through time, reveals the meaning only at the end. To arrive at the intended meaning, you have to pronounce all the previous ones as possibilities to be heard. In that way,

our Mother tongue

harbors the practical, the material roots of our entire lexicon, the bodily movements, the rhythms and the processes that are only partially abstracted in syntax and composition. I had been speculating whether this might be where the multitude, the ambiguity, and all the potentialities exert some form of resilience against authority and authorship, against meaning and rational order.

Just like the way

our Mother Tongue 

holds and reveals in each independent form, all of those that composed it,

A marble sculpture of the highest aesthetic quality depicting human form – the potentiality held in hermaphrodite form – a body that holds our two sexes at the same time, folding onto itself, in “Involute Love” as you put it; is also a body that holds marble’s geothermic formation, inside the Earth’s crust, the friction, the pressure, its fluidity, its becoming, all at the same time.

This collaging of micro and macro scales, of inner and intra-workings of form-as-process, culminates in the explosive forces within “The Big Digest” where repressive barriers – the pure, finished form; the constipation of a closed mouth; and even the frame itself - explode like the cracking of a dam. The crack centers on marble’s residual progression by juxtaposing different scales of visualization: as mineral, as geologic matter, as raw material, in the microscopic image, and in the aerial view over the quarry, gestating inside the Earth. From this dance of pressure and resistance come flying out spoons, platters, food, each item drawn and depicted in residual progression. From the crack towards the frame and out of it, a spoon is drawn, a spoon is cut out, pasted, a spoon is perforated – a spoon becomes a sieve, depicted not in surface likeness, but rather through its trace, through its displacement of matter, reminding us that what creates the form of the spoon is also its reserve, its material, its negative space. The agency of the background, of the container, of the seemingly inert material is brought thus to the fore, alongside the figure itself. And so it is for the marble quarry and the statue form, self as a folding of the other, inside as a folding of the outside, in involution. Even when we seek to insulate an image – a form – from the process of its emergence, be it biological, mineral, cultural or artistic, it remains enmeshed in contagious, infectious bonds.

It is those contagious, infectious bonds and collaborative processes that revolt us, but which we are called to confront with open eyes and embrace, if we are to “become worldly”. Every tool we create ends up shaping us – the machine produces the machinist. It is the resistance of matter as much as our physical or cognitive force that defines the forms we create. All that we love and devour during our lifetime – food and books, films and theories, people and animals - ends up becoming us, transforming us from the inside out. For all that is said and done, and regardless of place and time, cannibalism alone unites us[v].

[i] Mark Fisher, The Weird and The Eerie, Repeater Books, London, 2016

[ii] The reference here is Lynn Margulis’ Serial Endosymbiosis Theory. Lynn Margulis & Dorion Sagan, What is Life?, University of California Press, 2000

[iii] George Bataille, “La Bouche” (The Mouth), as published in the journal Documents c 1930

[iv] George Bataille, Ibid.

[v] Oswald de Andrade and Leslie Bary (Transl.), “Cannibalist Manifesto” (1928), Latin American Literary Review, Vol. 19, No. 38 (Jul. - Dec., 1991), pp. 38-47

[masliseven]

Landscape Between Form and Performance: Nida Art Colony

This exhibition review was published on Art Unlimited Magazine’s September-October 2018 issue and was made possible thanks to the generous travel support of the Nida Art Colony.

The Curonian Spit at the Western edge of Lithuania is a narrow strip of land shooting offshore toward the Baltic sea, formed by sand dunes over a long period of time, which delineate in turn, a lagoon. Recognized as a Unesco World Heritage site, preserved with human engineering and reforestation efforts since the late 19th century, it is currently a National Park, a tourist resort, and the site of the Nida Art Colony, a research and production-oriented residency institutionally affiliated to the Vilnius Academy of Fine Arts.

During my 15 hour trip to get to Nida for the first time, I was constantly staring at the map of the Curonian Spit and realizing in disbelief how fragile the strip of land looked, locked between the rough tides of the Baltic sea and a simmering lagoon, what a struggle it must have been to preserve it from slowly eroding away, and what it would feel like to have such a fragile home - almost immediately rectifying my thoughts to remember that the whole world, all the lands and scapes, as we know them, are vulnerable. Security and solidity are only illusions when it comes to our relationship with land, or home for that matter. Being in Nida as a passing guest is like being located somewhere in between place and non-place that exacerbates perception in a certain way: In great part constituted by sand, it moves, its shape is unfixed (like all pieces of land, but few force us to confront the fact). Host to a lush, sometimes threatening wildlife, it is, to a large extent the result of a collaboration between human and natural forces (also like all pieces of land, but rarely on such a scale). Nida and the Curonian spit at large have this reflexive effect: one gets immersed in the peculiar, almost eerie landscape, while constantly engaging in reflexive thinking about its conditions of existence and how it mirrors back on landscape, elsewhere and conceptually.

As we struggle globally to take stock of our changing relationship to land, the question of whether it is we the humans who have shaped the earth as it stands today, or if it is the land with its topological features, its flora, and fauna and its history that shapes us, humans, has paradoxically become a lot more complex than we thought, and increasingly vain at the same time. Do we ever really give form to anything, without taking form in return? We may think of ourselves as agents of our production, but what of the agency of matter within and without us? How can we sense and collaborate with processes that lie beyond and below our systems of representation?

Offering a unique site to speculate on such questions, Nida Art Colony was opening the exhibition “Per(forming) Scapes” curated by Vytautas Michelkevicius, with locally researched and produced works by six artists: Anna Romanenko and Bjorn Kühn (working in duo); Špela Petrič; Ona Lozuraitytė and Petras Išora (working in duo); and Lina Lapelytė. As announced by the title, the relationship between form and performance is explored by all the works through an emphasis on duration, repetition and time sequences; it also runs through the entire exhibition as the works and objects displayed inside the space all act as traces or scores that connect with performative processes outside and beyond the frame. Critically engaging with scientific, ritualistic and data-driven tools and practices that have become the interface of our dialogue with the environment, each work through its own unique process, describes a mutual relationship of becoming between matter and bodies in movement.

Such mutual becoming is precisely at the center of Lina Lapelytė’s sculpture-performance video “Play for the Parallels” in which five women, a cameraman, some church bells and the forest are co-performers. It’s a ritualistic, meditative piece sculpted by their collaboration. The camera repeatedly circles around the pile formed by five still bodies posed under the trees, in the apparently still forest that surrounds them. Throughout the loop, background, figure, movement and stability oscillate between the co-performers, we gradually lose certainty as to what constitutes each, until, with the sound of the church bells, they morph into a single piece of moving sculpture. “Play for the Parallels” may be the most formalistic of the works on display, but it also speaks with a conceptual simplicity that resonates throughout the exhibition with its emphasis on co-agency as the basis of form as a process.

A sculpture-installation-playground that draws a scape of its own within the exhibition space is “Local Fittings” by Anna Romanenko & Bjorn Kühn, which functions as a prop-device triggering a series of physical gestures the artists researched and abstracted from the landscape of the Curonian Spit. Speculating on the premise that tools produce and transform human subjectivity through repetition, i.e. “the machine produces the machinist”, “Local Fittings” invites participants to an interactive survey designed to make a character assessment, based upon which an exercise routine with the “machine” is assigned to each participant. The proposed sets of movements are rooted in the history and local practices of the Curonian Spit: the plugging gear originates from the crow plugging technique for hunting; the hauling gear is derived from the movement to pull fishing nets into the boat; the pricking gear, from the movement of planting pine trees to stabilize the dunes, and so on.  A sense of organicity emanates from the curves and bends of the wooden structure while its grid-like spatial form and its bouncing material resistance call for a methodical, repetitive approach to bend the curves – all the while the machine’s agency acts upon one’s muscle flexion and posture in specific ways. As such, the work opens up the question of site-specificity in an unexpected direction, working both with and against the context, derived from, yet resisting the site. In this relative detachment, as we perform the landscape as a score, abstracted in the form of a movement-generating machine, the experience culminates around (co)agency as laid between subject and object, and questions the possibility that subjectivity may be sculpted into solid form.

Ona Lozuraitytė and Petras Išora’s installation “Landscape Management” offers a dive into representations of landscape through archival material: photographic documentation of past human interventions, land survey and mapping examples, data visualization techniques. The installation emphasizes the multiplicity of agencies that form this landscape at micro and macro levels, as they appear through land use and mapping technologies: wind, water, human, rock, politics. The work speaks through the interplay of the invisible, hidden or opaque elements with visible and more directly accessible ones. A white fabric on the floor provides backdrop to a large-scale geo-thermic relief of the spit, while covering a second, almost symmetrical relief in parallel, perceived only through its contours: The portion of the Curonian Spit that belongs to Kaliningrad, the Russian exclave, in withdrawal, appears both as a blind spot and a ghost that haunts. A historical timeline hangs from the ceiling, in four languages with no translation. Together with the maps, these gaps of translation become a score to understand the landscape as a perforated one, its modes of representation changing with ebbs and flows of political history. In contrast to these ostentatious macro-scale elements, barely visible seashore schemes from 1986 drawn on the wall in soft graphite describe in minute detail the transformations of a wave nearing the shore of the Curonian Spit as it oscillates, breaks, impacts the seabed and the sand. Beyond what’s immediately perceptible, the installation itself operates as a tool for visualizing in space: choices made around visibility, fragmentation of visual elements, presence or absence of captions and translations suggest that tools of knowledge and representation, as much as display as a spatial technique, exert a semiotic agency of their own and collaborate as much as any earthly factor in scaping both the land and our mind.

Tools, as extensions of the human mind, body, and movement, are at the center of Spela Petrič’s participatory performance “Tools for Dissection of Phytopolitics (0.2)”, which unfolds in several sequences. Drawing from a multitude of positions, such as her background in biology, theories of agential realism, patapshycology and feminist theories of subjectivity in science, Petrič critically engages with the form and representations of scientific practice, from lecture formats and powerpoint presentations to fieldwork practice, laboratory equipment and analysis tools, by transforming them into props for performance, and in doing so, by fictionalizing them. Following a brief presentation on issues surrounding “plant blindness” – humans’ incapacity to perceive plants as active and interactive beings having an agency of their own – we, the participants, set out into the woods. We are equipped with the various tools for dissecting phytopolitics concocted by Petric in her lab, and given instructions to use them. As I enact a “schizo-xenophobic sadomasochist”, whipping robinia pseudoaccacia specimens and myself with a flagellation tool, others become “non-critical biodiversity hoarders” collecting specimens in a jar; perform as “vegetariat martyrs” sitting still on the ground wearing a cut out shirt and counting the number of bites collected as signs of martyrdom; corporealists measuring pine trunks one by one by embracing them with the wearable pine assessment tool; and so on. After having zealously pursued our pseudo-scientific fieldwork for some time, the actual significance of our gestures is revealed from a phytopolitical point of view, as collaborating in fertilization and pollination, communicating through feromones, feeding diversity, soil grubbing, etc. There is a lasting shift of perspective away from a utilitarian relationship with plants toward phytocracy that creates a discord between what we thought we were doing and what we were actually doing from the woods’ point of view. It is in this discord that we are confronted with the Otherness of plants. The tools become props for a different kind of performance shaped by human/plant co-agency, beyond and below the so-called scientific frame and its signifiers.

“(Per)forming Scapes” is an exhibition to be experienced, used, practiced participated in, rather than “viewed” or “looked at”. It requires presence. It is also an exhibition strongly connected to what stands outside of its frame, with lasting reverberations over the politics of alterity in land use, architecture, science, performance and nature/culture hybridity. Through this exhibition as well as its past programs of research and production, Nida Art Colony, taking full stock of its unique siting, turns the Curonian Spit into both the frame through which an artistic vision takes shape and laboratory for research and experimentation, for residents and passing guests alike.

[masliseven]

On Cengiz Çekil—Resistance: In Memory of a Dead Mattress

The below text is part of a series of monographic responses to the works of the late artist Cengiz Çekil (1945–2015) commissioned by m-est.org.

A white rectangular fabric is horizontally spread on the floor. A worn out bedspring stands perfectly centered on the space it delineates. A glowing red line of resistance cuts across the surface of the bedspring and divides it longitudinally into two symmetrical pieces. The display immediately brings to mind funeral rituals—forms of sanctioned exhibitions of corpses and ammunition, as well as displays of second-hand products at flea markets. The bedspring is declared dead by the work’s title, its corpse laid here for us to witness, and yet it also resists death by way of the electrical current, which, like a persistent ghost, becomes visible through its glowing resistance. Upon closer inspection, we perceive the underlying structure composed of 36 geometrical boxes, 4 x 6, below the loosened surface of the bedspring. The bedspring thus becomes a grid.

What is a bedspring? It is the structure underneath the mattress where we lie down to sleep every night. It is one of the rare places where we take a horizontal position—it is the individual space par excellence, the elementary space of the body [1]. A container for the body, then, transformed here into a body itself, a corpse even. If death is the eternal sleep, the final lying down wrapped in white cotton sheets, and if the bedspring is discarded and declared to be dead, do the two deaths cancel each other into life? Or does the resistance underline an afterlife instead, as in a memory, or in being haunted? Is the present ever only in the now, is it not always inhabited by memories and ghosts of moments past, people lost and hopes and fears for the future? What happens to a person’s language when they’ve passed away? What happens to their presence in space, their everyday manipulation of objects? Does anyone ever really die? Is any cause ever really lost or won for good?

Every element of Resistance: in Memory of a Bedspring serves to introduce disorientation to the conventional everyday meanings of things, setting them up along lines of tension drawn by these questions. A suspension of certainty that crystallizes the semantic potency of the objects at hand and diffracts it into multiple displacements of meaning in time, space, and context. According to Çekil, “Art is a language and its words can be found in objects, actions, and lifestyle that surrounds us, they are the ordinary objects of everyday life” [2]. The use and transformation of everyday objects and raw materials is a constant in the artist’s practice, establishing the permeability of his work by the vernacular and a sensibility to the shifts in surrounding social and material contexts. This allows in turn for his works of art to instill perspective and legibility onto ordinary things and situations and to pierce through the “blindness and anesthesia of the everyday,” to borrow George Perec’s words [3].

In many ways, Resistance… can be seen as one of the first recorded instances where Çekil’s early research into form arrives into fruition. The horizontal layout of the piece, as well as the fragile and transient qualities of the white fabric, is characteristic of Çekil’s works to come in the 1980s and 1990s. This method of arrangement and display defines a clear stance against the ideas of authority and autonomy of the works of art. The presence of the white fabric, both delineating the work’s space and incorporating it, along with its allusion to funerary ceremonies and various forms of display, is what casts the entire installation with a sense of ephemerality—the work is present here and now, within the confines of this fabric. Beyond the limits of this here and now, it may not remain so. There are no guarantees. The bedspring is not a random choice of object here, it is a manifestation of the other side of waking life, it is a close cousin of those spaces where our bodies are laid horizontally for the last time. Seen retrospectively and in light of Çekil’s later works, Resistance… communicates in an extremely condensed form, the artist’s lifetime preoccupation with temporary monuments, mausoleums, and altars.

The geometric arrangement and the grid-like structure of the mattress ring can be interpreted as an early manifestation of Çekil’s interest in arranging multiple units of the same in grids of twelve. However, this is not to be confused with a penchant for analytical conceptualism or research in purity of form. It is rather an accumulation of energy that the artist is seeking when he creates forms by multiplying and repeating elemental units such as bricks (Arrangement No.5, 1987), copper plates (Iron Earth, Copper Sky, 1975) or jackets (Tanned Jackets, 1994) and burnt Coca-Cola cans (Things, 1998), or when he arranges cast body parts and newspapers inside the grids of a metal shelf (Smashed into Pieces, 1998). This gesture of multiplication and repetition “on the one hand dissolves the uniqueness of these objects and on the other, it reinforces their effect, charging them with an energy” [4]. Beyond any formalist consideration, it is this emphasis on energy that runs through his works. Materialized through the line of resistance and electrical current in this work, energy, in Çekil’s oeuvre, is always in a process of formation by accumulation or by the repetitive recording of the understated, and it is the primary element in the creation of artistic, cultural and social forms.

“Resistance” refers to the physical process whereby matter interacts with matter. Energy is born through the transformation triggered by their friction. While fascinated by the physical process itself, Çekil—just like Joseph Beuys and Sarkis, with whom the artist was in intense dialogue during his formative years—was also preoccupied with the social processes of encounter and collision between opposing forces. The historical weight of the word “resistance” is also at work here. From the French Resistance movement against Nazi occupation to the memory—closer at the time of production of this work—of May 1968 movements’ resistance against the then-rising consumerism and state violence, the analogy between physical processes and social transformation is also one of the keys to understanding Çekil’s oeuvre. As it transpires from this work and many others to come, in Çekil’s terms, resistance is, rather than a confrontational force, one of resilience. Under oppression and despite the death spell cast upon society time after time by state violence, the resilient forces of life and art are always there, becoming in silence and taking forms that slip away from power. Çekil was a witness to decades of political violence and oppression mixed with aggressive liberalization and the rise of consumer culture in his home country, and throughout those decades, his emphasis has been on creative energy and potential for aesthetic transformation held when oppression meets resistance.

There is a sense of remoteness when one confronts a work of art only through its photograph, especially knowing that the work has been destroyed. Resistance: in Memory of a Dead Bedspring was installed for the first time in Çekil’s studio at the Beaux Arts in Paris in 1974. A year later it was installed for the second and last time as part of his only solo exhibition in Paris, “Réorganisation pour une exposition”, at the basement of a bar at the Latin Quarter. Despite the black and white tones of the static photograph, and beyond the passing of its author, I imagine it as alive and glowing with tension in physical reality. Seen from our current state of global unrest and in connection with the rise of walls and barricades all over the world against millions marching for their lives, for peace, for equality among humans and with non-humans, Çekil’s emphasis on energy, on its accumulation over time in giving form to matter and all else that surrounds us couldn’t be more relevant today.  

Notes

[1] Some of these reflections on the bed are taken from George Perec’s Species of Spaces published the same year in France. For the chapter dedicated to the bed, see George Perec, Species of Spaces, 1974, pp. 25–32.

[2] Cengiz Çekil, Beuys ve Biz [Beuys and Us], 1986, SALT Research, https://www.archives.saltresearch.org/R/-?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=3634243&silo_library=GEN01 (Last accessed: 23 June 2018).

[3] George Perec, Ibid.

[4] Özlem Altunok, “Interview with Cengiz Çekil,” Istanbul Art News, September 2014.

[masliseven]

Losing Form

Written in response to several field trips in collaboration with the artists collective Expediciones Puerto Piojo in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Published in “Chercher la Plage”, edited by DSRA Document et Art Contemporain, Ecole européenne supérieure de l’image & Ecole nationale supérieure d’art de Bourges. All photos by me.

This is a beach. Or is it? Is this a beach? 

What makes a beach, a beach?

Sand, first of all. The image of a beach has dry sand or dry pebbles. The more I stand here in Puerto Piojo, the more this image of the ideal beach crystallizes in my mind. This image is made of two distinct zones and a line, a border that separates them: an undulating field of dry sand and pebbles on one side, and the wavy surface of the water extending to the horizon on the other, divided by the shoreline.

This is not a beach. There is no dryness. There is no shoreline. And yet, land and water are separated. I am standing on what is supposed to be the land, but the ground is too soft, too muddy, too wet to even walk with these shoes. My feet sink into it. Discomfort sets in. This ground could swallow my feet at any moment. I try to weigh less. To move very slowly and at the same time to keep moving, to avoid standing too long at one point, so I can avoid sinking. My mind finds rescue in these shapes, in photographing them. It is through this act of photographing that I become aware of my thoughts. Something I can hold on to. 

Puerto Piojo is filled with decaying objects, whose vanishing shapes outline transition. They are captured in this transitory phase of becoming one with the sand, but not totally. Plastic can never totally merge, can it? But they have lost their form, been decayed and are in the process of becoming something other than what they once were. All of this rubble had a distinct form, once. This place is the wasteland of discarded things and beings that are losing form. They sink into each other, into the sand. The sand is no sand. This is rather a swamp where the discarded disappears from the eyesight, becomes indiscernible. A monitor. Bubble wrap. The dead body of a baby seal, fragments of brick walls, bones of a whale, plastic parts of things that were whole once.

Plastic never stops being plastic. Things lose their form and function but plastic remains what it is.

Plastic comes from petroleum.

I see ships making their way to the port, far out in the sea. They are in full form, and so is the petrochemical complex standing on the Dock Sud. This is their site, their space. Everything else is waste. This place is made of them and for their comings and goings. Containers along the way, barbed wire, and chains. And from the point of view of these ships, containers and the petrochemical complex rising on the Dock Sud, Puerto Piojo does not exist.

This is a beach whose use as a beach is inconceivable. And yet we are here, practicing the landscape.

The intertidal zone comes to my mind. The interface between land and sea, that area which is under the sea at high tide, and above the sea at low tide, is supposed be this fertile zone where species crawl out of the water, where evolution occurs but that reads as a moment of taking a new form, not losing it. Puerto Piojo seems at first like an intertidal zone, reversed.

Fertility. I remember being taught in geography class at primary school about alluvial deposits. Where the river meets the sea, the land is the most fertile because of alluvial deposits. In Puerto Piojo not one but two rivers meet the sea. And yet it is a swamp full of decay, toxic contamination, and amnesia. It is the repository for all things that the collective shuns from consciousness, for all things we’d rather wash ourselves clean of. And for that reason, it is also, along with the Riachuelo, the perfect site to begin taking stock of the catastrophic nature of the past, to use Benjamin’s words.

“Expedition” is a term that has long been associated with geographical expansionism. However, what we do here now is an expedition that has more to do with an in-depth, diachronic act of digging; approaching Puerto Piojo as a knot that binds together distinct layers of history and distinct logics of present deployment of industries and trade, of politics of memory and erasure, of toxic contamination and organic recycling. This is where we can begin to realize there is no purity, no perfect beach, no clear line between sand and sea, and to look at this as the matter of the world we inhabit, as it is.

As we row along the Riachuelo, approaching the city of Buenos Aires through its sewage system, and as we try to move on the swamp that is Puerto Piojo, a body is found in some distant river. I wonder what will become of all the graffiti, posters and banners now. Now there is an answer to the question of “Donde Esta”. I think of the bodies thrown out of airplanes during the death flights. How many bodies merged into these rivers? How many mass murders we do not commemorate? They never totally disappear. We are marked and wounded by the disappearance of the disappeared. Their loss cuts through the social fabric. Nothing is ever the same again. We transmit these wounds from one generation to the next.

All the Puerto Piojos of the world. It’s not just the name though. This logic of spatial arrangement, of visibility and invisibility, of the use and the appropriation of space, is identical everywhere. Puerto Piojos where the spatial production of industry and trade becomes traceable through its amassed waste and blind spots. Puerto Piojos are everywhere.

And somewhere along the edges of these spaces, projected museums, or projections of museums keep appearing. Like the expansion of the Proa, or the plans to turn the abandoned industrial buildings and warehouses along the Riachuelo to artist residencies, or the museum of natural history competing to acquire what remains from the body of a washed-up whale for free.

[masliseven]

Longing for Distance

This text accompanied Merve Unsal’s solo exhibition “Now You’re Far Away” at Galerist, Istanbul, June 2017. 

What confers photography its documentary status is the uncoded nature of the transfer from the natural world to the photographic image. But at the same time, this illusion of veracity or of continuity with the natural world depends on an act of isolation or selection of something from the continuum of reality, by a frame, which is at best arbitrary. This “paradox of the uncoded message” is at the origin of the relationship between photographic image and text, and points to the necessity of clarifying the ‘presence’ within the image by way of a descriptive text, what we commonly refer to as ‘captions’ or ‘legends’. In other words, the verisimilitude of the image is always obtained at the cost of an arbitrary distance, a gap, which is, after-the-fact, filled by narrative. Now you’re here – now you’re away. It is within this distance that desire, imagination and longing find their space, and fiction – as a means to reach any meaningful ‘truth’ – can be born. A quick search into the etymological origin of the technical term ‘legend’ leads us to this primary function of storytelling in relation to images and their documentary status: what used to refer in the 14th century to a “narrative dealing with a happening or event” becomes a fixture of photojournalism in the 20th century, all the while preserving its primordial relationship to fiction.

This same distance – and its potential loss - is the focus of Merve Unsal’s exhibition “Now You’re Far Away”. In the two series of works presented in the exhibition, “The New York Times Photographs” and “From a Window”, this “happening or event” in need for narrative or explanation appears to be the image itself. In both works, instead of functioning as ‘windows to the world’, images take on the appearance of screens blocking our gaze. Instead of expanding our views and perspectives beyond our immediate reach they refer only to themselves.

This screen effect is most visible in the series of projected videos, “From A Window” where Unsal creates a temporal expansion of still images of window frames by way of a voice-over. Windows, as the birth site of the landscape genre, have long functioned as seeing devices of their own kind. We’re accustomed to consider them as transitory spaces between interiors and the outer world, between our private spaces and the public space. This paradigm assumes as a matter-of-fact, a clear division between culturally organized interiors and exteriors and relatively stable boundaries separating privacy from public space – the separation is what makes negotiation and transition possible, along with desire and imagination. In contrast, looking through Unsal’s window frames, our gaze either meets the façade of a building in narrow vis-à-vis, or faces the blinds covering a series of balconies. These opaque surfaces - blinded windows, balconies or straightforward walls - block any kind of projection. In frustrating our gaze, on one hand she sends it back on the medium itself and directs our attention to the narrative at hand; on the other she conveys a sense of entrapment within the domestic space; an absolute retreat from the outer world that revokes all possibility of transition or negotiation between inside and outside.

“From a Window” functions on two levels. While the photographic images themselves resonate with the current loss of distance between public and private realms in Istanbul, the artist’s voice narrates a split monologue about desire through everyday objects and gestures, referencing images from popular culture. These monologues reveal a retreat towards the mundane. Through these narratives on the relationship between air conditioning machines and the loss of one’s sense of smell; how nylon stockings conceal and reveal something at the same time; the setting of bridges on fire and seeking to hide inside cabbage leaves, Unsal scratches the surface of our projected fears and desires. The situation is somewhat reminiscent of secluded characters in Chantal Akerman’s films, trapped in the performance of daily routines and intense monologues spiraling towards neurosis. In one of the videos, we hear the following: “What would happen to our desires if we were in a vacuum? Desire is something you become aware of only in its absence, as if it were only felt through its lack”. For any kind of representation – or desire - to be possible we need the gap created by the double process of abstraction and identification. There can be no love without distance. When either one of the two factors of the equation - distance or and identification - is lost in the ‘real’ world, can we recover it through a meditation on imagery and the nature of photographic image?

From her use of photographic still image through window frames to computer and smartphone screens, in the “New York Times Photographs”, Unsal’s main focus is the contemporary, algorithm-backed regime of visuality under which we live. Along with our digitally empowered mass media, we have turned the world into images. In this new regime, the image is no longer evaluated in relationship to a natural or living reality from which it isolates and reflects a portion or a moment. Instead, we are faced with an ever growing archive of superimposed images of news reporting that circulate endlessly through the digital networks, serviced through our cherished screens as customized products by the ever growing intelligence of algorithms.

The 14 images selected from the artists’ “New York Times Photographs” covers a span of 8 years of New York Times journal’s image-based news reporting and refers to the condition of this digital archive managed and serviced by the algorithm that sends us back and again to the confined bubble of our own interests and values based on the history of our searches. Each composite image is obtained by collapsing all photographs composing a slide show displayed on the newspaper’s website under a single headline. The resulting images are beautiful, hazy, dream-like abstract compositions. In some cases a pattern or a grid becomes visible. In others, the blue of the sky is recognizable despite the layers of human figures and other shapes obscuring it, and a sense of horizon is discernible. By color-coding their arrangement, Unsal points to their interchangeability as detached surfaces. These images do not refer to any reality beyond or outside of themselves. They are not photographs claiming to silently witness the course of life on the planet. What the algorithm achieves is a final rupture with the necessity of representation – with any claim to veracity outside of its coded conventions, furthermore, a final rupture with any truth beyond its own frame. The accompanying titles – news headlines – do not come to fill a distance, to explain or narrate an event. Instead they replicate the opaqueness of the abstract screens they accompany: did you like “an enemy evaporates”? You might also enjoy “a friendship comes with a toll” or “luck trumps death”.

These two works operate in conjunction with a happening Unsal staged a few days prior to the exhibition opening. Conceived as a secretive and furtive action, eponymously titled “Now You’re Far Away” gathered a selection of 15 people invited to a boat ride on the Bosphorus – on one of those boats that operate regularly for marriage proposals and declarations of love in written words projected on the lower surface of the Bosphorus bridge. Punctuating this maritime course, the words “Now You’re Far Away” were projected during 5 minutes on the bridge-turned-screen. These words were chosen clearly in reference to Zeki Muren’s song and its various dedications, retakes and repetitions over decades, bringing about a sense of longing and memories specific to moments in Turkish popular culture of the last 40 years. But longing for what?

During the two hour span of this secretive night cruise, Unsal’s guests were asked to bring an image, text or object that would “speak the unutterable”. In the face of a growing ideological apparatus that demands from reality to strictly conform to an image it has fabricated and disseminated, in a context where the relationship of the image in question to truth no longer matters, what is expressed in Unsal’s action and exhibition is a longing for that distance where desire can exist, and an attempt at recovering it.

[masliseven]

Conversation: Nancy Atakan and Asli Seven

Nancy Atakan’s solo exhibition A Community of Lines took place at Pi Artworks Istanbul, September-October 2017, a first-time collaboration between the artist and myself as the curator. Below is a written conversation between us that started a few weeks into the exhibition and ended in January 2018. It attempts to contextualize the exhibition within the wider frameworks of Nancy’s practice and those of the history and historiography of practical arts education of women in Turkey. Originally published on m-est.org

Aslı: In our first meeting around your exhibition A Community of Lines, you mentioned a point of intersection between the traditions of stitching in the US and the traditions here in Turkey, and the role this practice had played in women’s liberation in both contexts. Following this first conversation, I looked into the sampling tradition in the US and went through the online collections of several museums. While prescribing women’s production within the domestic realm, sampler-making and needlework also provided a space of emancipation as one of the first fields of specialization, marking women’s entry into public life as professionals.

I would like to go back to this starting point for our conversation to ask about your relationship with needlework, how this point of intersection between the histories of your two countries operate through your own biography, and most importantly this insistence on genealogical context when it comes to women’s work. Female genealogy is also at the center of your exhibition, but operates quite differently as you relate women’s subjective accounts of their own lineage; the women in your exhibition attempt to write their own history instead of being catalogued from the outside. How did you arrive at this point of intersection and what was at stake here?

Nancy: I grew up in a small town in Virginia, a conservative state where state universities accepted only male students. After high school, I attended Mary Washington College, an all female college. Like the other institutions for women seeking a higher education in Virginia, my college founded in 1908 initially trained women to be teachers and homemakers only much later becoming liberal arts colleges offering humanities courses. Even television programs had helped to instil in the women of my generation the belief that the only professions proper for women were nursing, teaching, airline hostess, or secretarial work. When I came to live in Istanbul, women professionals following careers as lawyers, doctors, bankers, architects, and engineers surrounded me in my husband’s family. One of my works specifically, Father Knows Best (2011), a silkscreen series, refers to the difference I observed. While getting married may have been a priority for Istanbul women, it was not abnormal for a middle class Istanbul woman to study engineering.

The first work in which I used lace was the video Grandmother’s Lace.  For this project, I visited and listened to the stories of elderly female family members.  Since I inherited a trunk of beautiful lace work made by my mother-in-law’s mother, I was particularly interested to learn about their tradition of lace making.  From these ladies (four who were actually born in Thessaloniki), I learned that the floral designs of the lace originated from abstractions of flowers that had grown in the gardens of family homes.

For one my first works using needlework, I thought of the historical importance handkerchiefs and made a series that I called Lingering Shadows (2015). Throughout my life I have always carefully organized and filed family photographs. I utilized computer-generated designs made from some family snapshots that have been digitally printed onto cloth and embellished with embroidery. I asked a retired teacher from the Olgunlaşma Institute* to help me produce these delicate handkerchief-sized objects. I realized that both handkerchiefs and needlework are only lingering memories in contemporary life.

As I worked on the Azade drawing series for the Sporting Chances (2016) exhibition, I realized that in Turkey women in the early Republic who were becoming professionals had only their fathers as role models.  I became curious as to their mother’s stories. Who were the mothers? I decided to collect stories from the daughters of women who were born in the early Republic. As usual I began with the oldest women in my Turkish family. Women’s stories have not been written, but sometimes they have been passed on orally to the next generation. I wanted to know what the daughters remembered about their mothers. I wanted to capture some of their stories. I have collected some stories, but the collaboration between you and I came closest to capturing what I had in mind. Most women I interviewed, rather than talk about their mother’s or grandmother’s professions or education spoke about feelings.  No doubt this also shows something important about female genealogy.

When I review works I have made to date, I notice that most deal with my Turkish family and very little with my American family. While it was not a totally conscious decision, I realize that the pieces in A Community of Lines bring together my past and present more strongly than any work I have previously made.

Aslı: You mention having organized and kept family photographs throughout your life. I think this personal archive has been one of the core materials feeding into many of your works. I am interested in your methodology in approaching these personal documents to put into question larger historical narratives, at times by creating very precise juxtapositions (as in the diptych What Something Is Depends on What It Is Not (2015), or Referencing and Silencing (2000)) and at others by using digital and transfer print techniques, alongside needlework. I would like to emphasize two aspects here: the movement between the personal and the historical aspects and the transition from photography as document to the deeply subjective renderings of needlework.

What emerges quite strongly in A Community of Lines is this highly personal, even bodily aspect of historical documents rendered in needlework. One individual’s stitching does not resemble another’s, it almost bears the mark of one’s body and breathing. I think this becomes apparent in some of the textual inscriptions on felt, such as When The Hand Tells Stories! or Return to Handwriting. Above all, the video Passing On II (2015), where a gymnastics routine is carried out by women from three different generations emphasize this bodily and subjective approach to memory. How do you negotiate this space between document and memory, fact and fiction, reproduction by print and the work of the hands or body-memory?

Nancy: This is a hard question for me to answer because I think I do it instinctively.  Nothing is planned, it just happens. I do extensive research for most of my work, but I look for generalities more than specific details. I am not looking for proof of anything or that something is right or wrong. My master’s degree was in psychology and counselling and I did what could be called scientific research projects. I used statistics, made propositions and tried to prove their validity, but none of this made sense to me. I make art to try to understand and make sense of what I am living, observing, feeling, thinking, and experiencing. The intuitive way, that uses serendipity and follows a crooked path makes sense to me. It reveals complexity and layers rather than detail.

In my opinion, everything is subjective. What we observe, what we find in our research depends on our individual perspectives. Memory is selective and what may seem true at one point may seem completely wrong at another. A photograph is a document of a particular time, person, thing, place.  We may look at it and recognize something. They freeze moments, but our memories are fluid. A date may be a fact, but almost everything else is fiction. When a teacher teaches with passion and knowledge, the student listens and takes something with them. In my opinion that feeling of excitement about a topic is important. If the teacher forgets a date or even remembers it a few years off, in my opinion, it doesn’t matter. Things need to be a bit off-center.  Fiction conveys more and touches people’s cores in a way that facts cannot. Creating an atmosphere, conveying a feeling, seeing multiple possibilities, remembering, searching is what is important to me.  I have never been interested in creating a recognizable style and wanted to be free to use whatever tool, material, or technique that I found important for a specific concept.

I have always been interested in the relationship between word and image. For the My Name is Azadeproject, rather than reproduce the photographs I found while researching her life, I decided to use the photographs as references for drawings.  The drawings are not pages in a book. Each one tells its own story by itself.  Handwriting rather than typed print seemed more appropriate for these drawings. As I said I am not interested in creating a recognizable style, perhaps it seems a contradiction that I am using my handwriting as an art object since everyone’s is different and can be traced to a specific person. But for this project it feels right. The handwritten story is more important than the drawings.  Personal stories told with handwriting—thoughts taken from my personal notebooks; ideas I agreed with from texts I have read seemed to require handwriting, a more personal form of communication, a recognizably personal and very individual form. Sewing is slow, rhythmic and repetitive even meditative, perhaps like a dance. It allows the body more time and carves messages into one’s memory. Each letter is a challenge.

Aslı: Your research for this exhibition relied mostly on subjective accounts of people alive today and whom you interviewed on their memories of their mothers and grandmothers. This was a way to recover the history of a specific generation of women who came of age during the transition from the Ottoman Empire to modern Turkey. In our private conversations you often mentioned that instead of facts or critical thinking, most of the time what you got from these interviews were feelings. I think this underlines the importance we do not give to our own subjective experiences—what we deem unimportant or uninteresting in our own lives, as well as the lives of our parents is actually the most revealing in terms of contradictions that underpin women’s history and historiography in Turkey. The most compelling information is transmitted through the silences or gaps in life stories. This silence also translates into how we approach material culture.

To go back to the beginning of this conversation, much of the work done by these women at Institutes such as Olgunlasma was never deemed important enough to be part of public knowledge – even though in the 1930s state-sponsored exhibitions of practical art schools were common for a time, they were gradually abandoned and completely disappeared through the 1970s. This seems to represent today a missing link within the history of practical arts education in the early Republic years. You have actually previously attempted to open a dialogue around these works, with Granny Leyla’s Bedsheets from 1999 and Grandmother’s Lace from 2004, which was on view at the group show Trans ID at the Surp Yerrotutyun Church as we opened A Community of Lines. Could we trace a genealogy of this exhibition by looking into these works from 15-20 years ago?

Nancy: They can definitely be linked. In 1998 my mother-in-law passed away.  I made these works around that time. While I had listened to her stories and kept many memories, I realized there were so many stories that died with her.  Only a few of her friends and relatives remained and I believed I must collect a few more stories before it was too late. But, now I know I did not do enough. There are so many untold unrecorded stories, not just the stories of women from my family. The quality of the needlework I saw when I interviewed family members for my early work, surpassed anything I could imagine in skill, design, and sophistication. My generation was more interested in being modern, didn’t particularly want to use them, didn’t learn from their mothers to make needlework and put their grandmother’s and mother’s work into trunks. I used the pieces I inherited. I slept on bedsheets made by my husband’s grandmother, ate on table clothes she had sown. But, they were delicate and needed to be preserved and repaired. Over time lace in particular began to fall apart and finding someone to repair them became difficult. I bought acid free paper, wrapped them and I put many into a trunk.  But, they should be in museums, not trunks.  

Now, I am in Stockholm to collaborate with a Swedish artist and continue my research about needlework exploring transliteration and translation. Searching for similarities, perhaps searching for a common female language, yesterday we explored the Nordic Museum where there is a section for needlework. We looked at work from a specific time, the late 1800s and up until 1930. What struck my heart was to see women’s work valued and preserved, but still stored in glass file cabinets, another type of trunk, still classified under folk art, rather than framed and displayed on the walls of the museum equal in rank to oil paintings made by men. While I am here, the Swedish artist, Maria Andersson and I will make a wall panel out of fabric and needlework, a work we have named, Marking a Shift (2017), a wish, a proposal for a collaborative, cross-cultural inclusive non-hierarchic life style, respective of animal, plants and objects shared by everyone.  We are looking to the past, the body movements shared by women performing gymnastics then and now, here and there. We are choreographing a story about our research and work together.

Aslı: Thinking about your collaboration with Maria Andersson, Marking a Shift, the word “activation” comes to mind: the activation of the historical material at the core of your research on Azade and the story of her father Selim Sirri Tarcan who brought Swedish gymnastics into Ottoman society and practice. Together with Maria you reenact the photographic documentation, trying to perform these movements, a transliteration of sorts. This process is then translated onto a collage of needlework that functions almost like a choreographic notation. I was intrigued by your decision to display this work along with its negative space, the carved out pieces of fabric, which I believe, carries something of the process into the work itself. Could you elaborate on this process in Stockholm, moving between historic examples of needlework, gymnastics reenactments and music?

Nancy: Maria and I started collaborating in 2012 when we discovered our shared interests in cultural transliteration and transcultural exchange. Our joint and individual research about Swedish Ling gymnastics as a modernist project in Sweden and Turkey has led to a series of separate works using our own modes of production. This work built several parallel narratives directly and loosely connected to Selim Sırrı (Tarcan), who brought Swedish Ling Gymnastics to Turkey during the Ottoman period and his daughters Selma Sırrı (Tarcan) and Azade Sırrı (Tarcan) who, influenced by their fathers radical ideas and ideals of a society, in the formative years of the Turkish Republic became pioneers of modern dance (Selma) and developed a therapeutic method of teaching gymnastics to everyone (Azade).

In October 2017, I spent three weeks at the NKF, the Nordic Art Association, in Stockholm sponsored by IASPIS. During this residency program, Maria and I produced two new video works: a back of the scenes video, Learning from the Past, Preparing for the Future (2017) and a performance video, Overlapping (2017); as well as a collaborative textile based piece, Many Unknown Things (2017). For our joint exhibition, we chose the title, Marking a Shift, because we researched a period in time when a major shift was taking place not only in Turkey, but also around the world. From Sweden, Selim Sırrı brought the music for the Youth March (Gençlik Marşı), Ling gymnastics, and impressions of a new life style back to the Ottoman Empire at the turn of the 20th century. With own 21st century sensibilities, we concentrated on this critical shifting time in the past, a period of hope and anticipation, wondering whether or not cross cultural collaborative work could help us better understand the  ‘shift’ that is taking place today.

We made the video, Learning from the Past, Preparing for the Future, on the first day we worked together. We projected on the wall photographs of women taken from the Gymnastic Central Institute in Stockholm in the early 1900s as they performed Ling Gymnastics. We proceeded to teach each other the movements by analyzing the positions of the women in the old photographs.  While we worked together and practiced the stances it was as if we were being taught by shadows.

Many Unknown Things is a collaborative textile based work that abstracted forms referencing Ling gymnastics, Azade and Selma Sırrı (Tarcan)’s gymnastic and dance movements, and examples of Turkish kilim and needlework designs. We visited the Nordic Textile Museum in Stockholm where we found several textile cross-cultural similarities and chose a color scheme based on antique fabric we saw there. The fabric wall panel is a thought track, choreography and a search for models for collaboration and sharing. Most of my three-week residency was spent making this textile wall piece. Choosing the color scheme and fabric even cutting out the shapes, ironing on backing, making duplicates took a great amount of physical effort, but it seemed we instinctively knew what we wanted. Quickly we had the colors, shapes, words and symbols but the real task was to choreograph our visual dance.  It was a continuous trial and error process of pinning, sewing, looking, changing, and starting all over again. One night I decided one of the circles had to move over the edge of the background and finally the threads and figures and color combinations seemed to work, but we both thought something was missing. The night before the opening of our exhibition we felt totally frustrated. We went out, had a few glasses of wine, cleared our heads, got some fresh air, came back and started to dance as we moved outside the rectangle arranging onto the wall the negative pieces of cloth discarded on the floor around the studio. That was what was missing. We had stopped playing and had become too cerebral, too cramped. When we let our spirits fly everything fell into place and the project finished. We learned: That what is left outside is as important as that inside—the unsayable is as important as the sayable.

*Olgunlaşma Institutes were established in 1945 and there are still 12 functioning institutes in 11 cities. They offer a two-year training for girls who have graduated at least from primary school.

[masliseven]

Beloved Land, Between Ruins and Monuments

Catalog text for Tunca’s exhibition “Terra Amata”, Galerist, September 2017.

Architecture is shelter, but it is also a representation and a form of communication. Engaging with architecture both in its functional and symbolic implications, Tunca’s exhibition at Galerist brings together two seemingly distinct historical moments to reflect on our present conditions of inhabiting a home, a piece of land, and more broadly the planet.

Taken literally, Terra Amata means “Beloved Land” in latin and refers to the most primal instinct of settling upon a piece of land as dwelling, shaping the land into a built environment that carries not only the functions of a home, but also all the symbolic value attached to the idea of home, to be transmitted through generations. Historically, the name is attached to a particular Paleolithic settlement located in southern France, whose archeological excavation took place in 1966 and marked the discovery of the oldest fabricated shelter in the form of huts – what might be called the first architecture – along with the first traces of domestication of fire. It is compelling to note that the discovery of the settlement owed to a major construction project for high-rise apartments along the French Riviera, as bulldozers dug into the ancient sand banks to prepare the site for these new buildings. The remains found on site are displayed today in the Museum of Terra Amata, located at the entrance level of a residential building – precisely one of the high-rise apartments in construction on the archeological site at the time. In choosing to title his exhibition Terra Amata, Tunca emphasizes a series of associations from this narrative: the settlement on a piece of land, the building of the most primal shelter, the process by which nature takes back built artifacts in time, sediment upon sediment, until finally modernity interweaves ruins and new architecture, and in the passing, gives rise to a museum sheltered in a residence - from shelter to modern architecture and from ruin to museum. A similar narrative is at work in the exhibition itself, linking the extremes of modernity to the concepts of shelter, monument, ruin and art gallery.

The second and stronger historical site Tunca juxtaposes with this first reference is the site of concentration camps, specifically the Auschwitz-Birkenau camps in Poland. This is where the links between architecture on one hand and ideology and utopia on the other become most apparent; but the artist insists on drawing our attention to the idea of shelter as the core of all building activity. Taking central stage within the exhibition is a series of three black and white drawings of simple-looking façades: a rectangular shape topped by a triangular roof, with geometric doors and windows. This basic architectural form seen from the front, reduced to two-dimensionality, is reminiscent of children’s drawings of houses. The series is called Domus, titled after the ancient roman house, itself named after the latin root ‘dom’, which means to build. Tunca has chosen to reflect on the architecture of home through the context that seems most at odds with the ideas of safety and shelter that home suggests. Behind this choice lies the artist’s personal experience of the camps in question – of seeing a child’s drawing of a house and a school on one of the walls of the barracks. This was a child’s mind’s architecture of home, of the everyday boundaries of safety between home and school.

This paradoxical setting is in in fact how Tunca activates history in turning our gaze to the present moment, eroding the levels of abstraction in passing from home to homeland, from shelter to the modern nation state. Moreover, the black and white tones he chose to render these spaces confers them an archival, documentarian tone that underlines the ambivalent position of these buildings - as well as the history they carry - between a state of ruin and a state of monumentality, not unlike the black and white films depicting the atrocities committed on these sites, repeatedly broadcast worldwide every year and decade of commemoration. It is in the moment we freeze these artefacts as monuments that the spectacle begins and risks trapping history in an abstract image, the contemplation of which leaves us in awe rather than opening up to a critical evaluation of our present. Rather than encapsulating history in the past, Tunca sets out to extend the architectural experience into the space we are in by installing a brick wall that cuts through and fragments the gallery space. Somewhere in the middle of this wall a decayed, worn out piece of brick stands out. Fragmenting the brick wall itself, it brings a piece of the concentration camp into the gallery space. With each gesture – the pictorial representation of the barracks, their spatialization within the gallery through a brick wall that cuts through the space, and the insertion of a single brick that fragments the wall itself, Tunca proceeds with a series of ruinations.

In Benjamin’s terms, dialectical ruins are absent and present at the same time. They always refer to something beyond their immediate materiality. They are fragmented and they fragment. This idea of ruins and ruination, not as a symbol but as allegory, not as a finished totality but as a process, runs through the entire exhibition. Thus the artist’s gaze allows us to see these architectural structures as dialectical ruins — not to be awestruck with horror and contempt, but rather to confront and relate them along with the history they carry into our own fleeting present.

[masliseven]

Between Men

Catalog text for Rasim Aksan’s solo exhibition “12.12.12″ at Galerist, Istanbul. December 2016.

Approaching the new series of works by Rasim Aksan, before attempting a critical reading, as a female writer I first had to get familiarized with ‘daybreak cards’ – an image-object that stands at the core of day counting practices within mandatory military service in Turkey, one of the most deeply ingrained and widely spread rituals associated with male bonding through suffering and projection in the context of confinement. These four-fold cards are printed by several companies and distributed inside military camps and service manuals; a wide choice of software and online services for customized daybreak cards also exist. The front side of these cards combine erotic photographs of semi-naked women, images of the motherland to be defended by male soldiers with heavy weaponry and a kitsch imagery composed of flowers, bouquets and hearts alongside words of love and longing. On the flip side are a calendar and a graphic rendering of the number 365 or 460 – the number of days one has to spend in the military service - composed of small numbered boxes to be filled as days go by.

These daybreak cards and associated rituals stand at the center of Aksan’s exhibition 12.12.12. Through his extremely detailed, time consuming hyperrealist work the artist establishes a clear analogy between his chosen method and medium of work and the act of counting days by meticulously scratching one box everyday to achieve a larger image in the end of a long process. This analogy is further reinforced by the title of the exhibition that refers to the date when the artist was first drafted into mandatory military service and underlines the autobiographical tone of the exhibition. Aksan reinterprets the imagery of daybreak cards with a critical focus on the associative relationships they build between patriotic sacrifice to defend the homeland, longing for loved ones, war scenes filled with heavy weaponry and eroticized female bodies. His arrangements shed light on these images as privileged objects of male projection throughout the experience of military service that lies at the foundation of an exclusively male socialization and as such they reflect back on the patriarchal power relations within contemporary Turkish society.

The coexistence of images and texts, as well as the four-fold narrative structure of these works open up multiple avenues for interpretation. As such, they can be read in the light of a few distinct but interrelated points of convergence between several artistic forms in their historical specificity on one hand and strategies of social engineering and homosocial male bonding in the context of military confinement on the other.

What transpires initially from the image and text arrangements of Aksan’s daybreak cards is a melodramatic tone that combines heroic male aspirations, self-sacrifice for greater moral values of patriotism, a fascination with heavy weaponry and combat scenes with a sense of continued suffering through longing for the loved ones, as well as for eroticized female bodies as sites for sexual release. The textual messages shift between the four images and create a space of open association between these distinct elements.  

Upon closer inspection and through the sheer number of examples at view, these combinations offer an insight on the strict but undisclosed rules of their arrangement. Textual messages such as “You are my longing”, “This passion will never end” or “You are hidden in my every teardrop” are exclusively reserved for images of flowers and hearts but never printed alongside erotic images. Another kind of textual message is reserved for scenes of combat and underlines the dedication and sacrifice of the individual in defense of the homeland while reinforcing some of the founding myths of Turkish national identity: “Every Turk is born a soldier”, “All I think about is my homeland” or “We have written every inch of this land with our blood”. This rule of association creates a space of transition between love and sacrifice for the motherland and longing for one’s family or lover, while strictly forbidding any affective bonds with female bodies. Text is consistently missing from the erotic images. Operating on a subliminal level, this structure of the messages paradoxically forbids love for female bodies and encourages their objectification as sites of sexual release, while it sanctions the close association between motherly affection and sacrifice for the homeland qualified as ‘mother’.

Military service, as a rite of passage, has been and continues to be a foundational experience of exclusively male socialization in modern Turkey, and just like all institutions of confinement it is an essential pillar through which patriarchal values are engineered, fined-tuned, adapted and reproduced within the individual – in this case exclusively male – members of society. In Aksan’s exhibition this aspect of social criticism is underlined through several other works on display, notably an installation of works on paper depicting portraits of family members where the artists’ self-portrait as a schoolboy in uniform stands out. Through primary and middle school, and later the military service, we are contained and united in uniforms. The family photographs are tucked into a half-window sill, bringing into the exhibition space a fragment from a family home that functions in parallel to the daybreak cards, this is a partial fragment from the domestic space where women – not the erotic objects but mothers, sisters and wives - await and pray for their absent male relatives.

Much of the last few decades’ writing about patriarchal structures emphasizes that ‘obligatory heterosexuality’ is built into male-dominated kinship systems. In her seminal work “Between Men”, Eve Kosofky Sedgwick argues that ‘in a society where men and women differ in their access to power, there will be important gender differences in the structure and constitution of sexuality’, a consequence of which is a ‘strict opposition between homosociality and homosexuality of men, whereas for women, there seems to be a widely accepted continuity’. What might first appear paradoxical in Aksan’s daybreak cards can be understood in light of this analysis: while enabling a homosocial male desire to emerge among its youth, the military apparatus also needs to enclose those same desires in strictly heterosexual forms, forbidding any allusion to male homosexuality within its confines, and this is precisely what the eroticized female bodies are meant to achieve. The artist hints at this potential continuity between homosociality and homosexuality in another series of works: a number of cards he has reproduced and modified are scattered on the floor of the gallery, advertising for sex workers of both heterosexual and trans women.

The violence and sexuality, as well as the moral codes imaged in these cards are not merely theatrical, nor exclusively confined to the spatial and temporal limits of military service. They are representative of a pathos that not only shapes and translates certain traits of popular contemporary Turkish culture but also reiterates itself constantly by borrowing imagery from our global interconnected visual culture. In his reinterpretation, Aksan conserves the rules of association described above but replaces and reshuffles the iconography on these cards by inserting images found online, of half-nude international celebrities, images reminiscent of Hollywood blockbuster film posters and at times he replaces the figure of the soldier with a self-portrait. This editorial gesture diversifies and extends source materials on one hand, pointing at specific microcultural interpretations of images in mass circulation, and more importantly at the complicities between global and local representations of patriarchal values. On the other hand, by weaving ‘selfies’ into the fabric of this grand narrative of male patriotism and longing, it brings into critical focus mechanisms of projection and internalization at work between grand political narratives and individual identity within this specific iconography.

*Photo credit: Ridvan Bayrakoglu

[masliseven]

Casting The Circle

The text below was written to accompany the exhibition “Casting the Circle” I curated at Galerist, Istanbul during June-July 2016 with three artists: Luna Ece Bal, Romina Meric and Mukerrem Tuncay.

Casting The Circle refers to the multiple meanings associated with the act of casting: casting a mold to give form to matter, casting a spell or cards to see and effect the future, casting actors to play out a role, or casting a net to abstract a meaningful portion from the wider expanse of reality. Casting a circle is then to draw an impassable spatial and temporal limit that suspends the acquired knowledge of reality (i.e. common sense) to suggest alternate modes of producing meaning and action; while at the same time it refers to contemporary eco-feminist revaluations of practices of magic and witchcraft.The circle that is cast by each one of these three artists acts as a hole within the fabric of the real. The works in the exhibition propose metamorphic relationships between altered states of consciousness, sleep and wakefulness, science and magic, human body parts and elements of landscape.

In her video “Great Depression”, Mukerrem Tuncay, with a single gesture, tears a hole on a mattress and on the fabric of her own consciousness and delves into the other side of sleep where decomposition, rebirth and nourishment coexist. Filmed in close-up sequences, the artist’s passage into the underworld of her bed, into the other side of sleep is triggered by a small leaf of basil stemming out of the mattress. We see the artist’s hands tearing the fabric to allow for the plant to grow, opening the pathway into the solid underground world of soil and earth – this act of birth through which the repetitive plant and flower patterns on the mattress’ surface come alive also marks the passage of the artist’s body and conscience below the earth, into an imaginary realm where death and birth exist in a circular flow through different bodies: the artist’s, of the plants that grow underneath her bed (most of which carry medicinal properties) and a worm’s (the slow undulating movement of which illustrates this circular movement). At the other side of waking life lies a recirculating flow.

This idea of a circular flow between different living and dying bodies is also central to Tuncay’s two other works in the exhibition. “Letter to Kuzu” is an autobiographical work and acts as the artist’s testament to her cat Kuzu. Confronting the potential imminence of her own death, and attesting to the dire social and economic conditions of a given period in the artist’s life, the letter advises Kuzu in the wake of Tuncay’s death to not dwell too long in sadness and to start eating her body when there is no more food left in the apartment. In order to allow for life to flow through birth, nourishment and death, Tuncay insists that her body be recycled into her cat’s.

"White elixir or an essay for recycling II" stages this circular movement in two opposite directions simultaneously. The photograph shows two coexisting versions of Mukerrem Tuncay, as the artist shares her name with her grandmother: One is young and at the prime of her life, and the other is old and approaching the end of her days. The two figures wear the exact same clothes, a strategy that further erases their difference and increases their identity, this might as well be the same person caught in two different moments of life. The young Mukerrem here is offering glasses filled with “white elixir” to the old Mukerrem, an elixir of youth, of a transformation triggered by this gesture between past and future. Arranged on the table at the forefront of the photograph are medicinal plants young Mukerrem found in the garden of old Mukerrem and they complement the elixir in their transformative, healing power. This white elixir also alludes to milk as the primal food, further marking the reference in this work to female lineage and generational transmission between grandmother and granddaughter of both biological and cultural information.

Inside the exhibition space, following Tuncay’s video, a major work by Romina Meric, “Lullaby” depicts three human figures in earthy tones, dwelling on the surface of the earth while more than half of the canvas’ surface is reserved to the underground realm, a subterranean space filled with lively strokes, reminiscent both of plant roots and underground reserves of water. There is a ghostly figure stemming out of the subterranean space into the surface overshadowing the three figures – the movement of which is reminiscent of Bachelard’s words: “[it] has the power to uphold – to hold up – and a power to terebrate – to bore down [so that] the root comes down paradoxically to life in two directions”.  Tuncay’s “Great Depression” and Meric’s “Lullaby” set the tone of the exhibition by evoking the circular movement of life, death and nourishment on one hand; and by introducing the permeability of social reality and oneiric life.  According to Bachelard, the earth is attached to material imagination, because its first and immediate characteristic is its resistance to our perception, it is the primary matter, our primary partner in imagining and creating form. On the other hand, the root is the image of the living dead, the serpent in the soil, the coiling intestines of the earth itself “that touches on the subterranean life deep in us”, the root therefore belongs to dynamic imagination.

Romina Meric’s paintings in the exhibition suggest morphological parallels between landscape and human body parts, where wounds drawn in the flesh unite the body of the earth and that of female figures in a surreal atmosphere. A floating spinal cord in “Rainbow over spine and mountains” connects with a reversed tree – suggestive of human lungs - floating in the air in “Never Not”. The formal connection between Tar Planes and Back Pocket suggest a parallel between the shape of a mountain and that of a female upper torso seen from the back, carrying a wound. The female figures in Meric’s paintings are insistently drawn from the back, a strategy that encourages viewer’s identification with these figures. On two of her drawings displayed here, we see female figures bending on the ground, obstinately occupied with what might be gestures of a search or a digging into the ground – connecting with the gesture of Mukerrem Tuncay in her video work, digging into and tearing her mattress. Images of mountaintops adorn the background of both drawings. This bending position is actually the position of the artist’s body as she works on her paintings – the drawings are therefore reflective of her own creative process. The ritualistic atmosphere of these three drawings is also what connects them to Luna Ece Bal’s series on display in the same room, the Magic on Paper series.

Luna Ece Bal’s “Magic on Paper” series links traditions of witchcraft to modern science as her water-marbled black circles on paper evoke both forms of stem cell imagery and the magic circle, a fundamental element in witchcraft traditions. Bal diverts the traditional artisanal form of water-marbling with her minimalistic and monochromatic use of the medium. Combined with the chance imagery of this traditional craft, the resulting forms blend traditional cultural forms with scientific imagery of microscopic views of life forms. The water-marbled works are pinned on a steel rope, suggestive of the drying process of these same works after being pulled off of the water. The use of natural pigments and the ritualistic nature of the water-marbling process is also evoked in her short poem accompanying the works:

“Aged horse’s hair tied to a rose-wood stick; Here’s thy brush! Earth & fiery coals; Here’s thy colors! At the end of each ritual are caught fractals of nature - & not symbols- on grainy surface. I look to the Universe, through both ends of this organic, telescope-paper.”

The installation of the works on paper is complemented with a table display of poetic objects, texts and photographs from the artist’s studio, transforming the display into one of artistic process. Arranged on the table we see corals and sea shells transformed through paint, mirror fragments, a candle and a talisman – objects which are all part of Bal’s ritualistic approach to art-making and her continued interest in traditions of witchcraft, alongside female reproductive organs and processes. Combined with the forms of her water-marbled circles, the artist’s preoccupation with the scientific understanding of reproduction processes blends with questions of reclaimed female reproduction and cultural creativity.

*Installation photos by Nazli Erdemirer

[masliseven]

Vertigo: Lifting The Horizon

The text below was written for the catalog of Murat Akagunduz’s exhibition Vertigo held at Arter, Istanbul between the dates 30 March - 15 May 2016. You can find more information on this exhibition I curated along with a series of sound performances here. 

At the origins of geographical maps lies the ambition to create a one-to-one representation of the world. The desire for objective scale and scientificity is inseparable from a narrative about the subjective position and movements of a human figure in space and time, from the idea of a “traveller in the map” as described by Italo Calvino. In his exhibition “Vertigo”, Murat Akagündüz brings together global positioning technologies and a mythological mountain. While the series, named after the Kaf Mountain, emphasises a mythological narrative, each painting in the “Kaf” series takes its title from the latitude and longitude coordinates defining the position of the image on Google Earth. Akagündüz offers us views over the peaks of the Alpide Belt, spreading across three continents, and provides us with the coordinates of the Kaf Mountains at the same time.

In juxtaposing mathematical exactitude with the perceptually challenging monochromatic use of the colour white, Akagündüz’s intention is to use minimal conditions of visual representation. The “Kaf” series, in its search for a language using different shades of white, winnows down the minimal conditions of pictorial representation to a bare-bones relationship between light and shade and approaches the threshold of visual perception. This choice does not arise from the fact that mountain summits are covered with snow and look white on Google Earth. It is detached from mimeticist representation and targets a frontier concerning the conditions of possibility of painting itself, a liminal space between visibility and invisibility.

Two series of drawings, “Trace” and the “Mountain Drawings” produced at the same period as the “Kaf” paintings were excluded from the exhibition but reproduced in the accompanying publication, since they elaborate on this approach. In “Trace”, Akagündüz experiments with two methods of drawing: tracing a line on a surface, or making the texture of a surface visible, by producing a “rubbing” through pressure. This is a pre-figurative gesture that gives visibility to the texture of the paper and also produces a trace. In these drawings, the artist connects with a late-discovered feature of Palaeolithic cave drawings: These forms were created by using the textures and gradients of wall surfaces and completing them. The artist’s gesture does not aim to smooth over this texture, in other words to make the material conditions of the drawing invisible and thus create an “elsewhere”, but to make the material support visible in the drawing. In the “Mountain Drawings” series, studies on patterns are included, making the alphabet of the image visible. Drawings of patterns are presented alongside the drawings in which these same patterns compose recognizable shapes and become mountains. Just like the potential of a word to dissolve into phonemes and disappear into sound, these drawings allow images to appear only at the cost of showing their potential to dissolve into patterns and gestures and disappear. The choice of white in the “Kaf” paintings tries to recapture a similar ‘primitive’ stage that precedes figuration. By maintaining the figures on the verge of invisibility, they shed light on something else: a resistance that comes to counter the dizzying conditions of the intensely data-backed visual representation of our times.

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Google Earth, which seems like a monolithic visual copy of the earth, is technically a database of satellite and aerial photographs taken in different points in time and stitched together. It is never complete – always in becoming. This collage of perspectives reduces the difference and repetitions in the movement of time and space onto a single plane. At the same time, it is part of a new regime of visuality, where everything and everyone is made equally visible through the invasion of the air by drones and satellites, constantly turning the world into images. By adapting this mobile view from above allowed by digital visualisation technologies, our partners in co-constructing reality in the 21st Century, the “Kaf” series reveals the contemporary conditions of visual representation and points to an ongoing transformation of our perception of time and space.

Google Earth is part of a new regime of visuality that turns the Earth into images and provides a fresh update of Bentham’s Panopticon, yet, as a power device it does not contain the conditions of landscape in itself. What defines landscape is an act of incision, creating distance by cutting out a sector from an endless and indifferent expanse, separating a corner from the Earth. By cutting out sectors from the digital map, and by transferring them onto canvas, Akagündüz first of all captures a sense of distance. In this distance, he creates and articulates layers of representational intersection between the Earth and the map, the computer screen and the canvas, the digital image and painting. A representational abyss opens up, with intensifying mirror effects reflecting our position on the Earth and our relationship to space, while examining contemporary conditions of visual representation.

What is the connection between a human figure standing in natural surroundings and staring curiously at the sky – for example, at the Moon – in 19th Century Romantic landscape paintings and a human figure positioned in outer space and observing the Globe through a digital interface in the 21st Century? What kind of subject/object relationships between human figures and their surroundings are implied by the spatial construction of landscape painting and the gaze that it calls for? Are human beings disembodied gazes residing in abstract networks of information and communication, surrounded by images, seeing everything from nowhere? Or are they the objects of such a gaze?

The most primal perception of humankind sees the mountain peaks not as parts of the Earth but rather as belonging to the sky and the air. Mountain peaks do not belong to a corner of Earth that is inhabitable by humans. In both Western and Eastern landscape traditions, we are accustomed to seeing mountains from a distance, rising up from below and into the skies; always in a configuration between the sea level and the line of the horizon, as much as in relation to the respective positions of humankind, nature and the gods. Horror on one side, and admiration on the other. In both these senses, mountains are a privileged site of the sublime, of the sense of infinity that human beings experience through elevation and of their despair when confronted with their own finitude.

The mountain, which rises up in front of humans as a physical and psychological border, is at the same time a site of immense possibility once conquered: commanding all its surrounding space, both near and far, it is the site of an omniscient view.

Murat Akagündüz’s “Kaf” paintings work against this understanding of mountains and their stabilising effect on the space surrounding them. Viewers who contemplate these paintings do not see the mountains from below, nor do they observe the environment from its peaks. They are on the cliffs or facing the summits, their feet are off the ground, they float in the air. Mountain ranges become uncanny under this elevated and close-up view proposed by the paintings. Akagündüz observes the mountains through a digital interface that monitors the Earth with a satellite view. The line of the horizon is either invisible or it escapes the eye by merging with the upper corner of the canvas. This escape of the horizon points to the loss of a spatial reference point that allows subjects to perceive themselves in space. “Kaf” paintings leave viewers alone with the anxiety of a loss of balance, by positioning them as an eye floating in the air and looking at the Earth from above. They turn viewers into the falling object of a vertical perspective. By disrupting their ability to locate themselves or the surrounding objects in space, the paintings create a vertigo effect.

“Kaf” paintings convey a distortion of gravity; the viewer is pulled towards the paintings. This impression of falling is intensified by the size of the canvases, which are slightly taller than the average human height, and this points to a new fluidity, an interchangeability in the relationships between subjects and objects: while falling, “people may sense themselves as being things while things may sense that they are people.”

This free fall does not merely arise from the impact created by a vertical perspective. The “Kaf” series places the viewer into what Bachelard calls “aerial imagination”, the realm where “a poetic form of meditation that replaces the Cartesian method of doubt with a method of erasure” is born. The paintings bring the process of emergence of form to the eye and to memory, between appearance and disappearance, through reverberations in time. At first sight, these appear to be abstract fragments that are difficult to read in terms of their relationships of scale to the reality they were cut off from. The even distribution of light on the entire surface and its movements through various shades of white, by evading the eye, catch and hold the gaze. The stains, which slip away and alter the moment we think we have caught an image, are contiguous with the void and create a silent space of tension. As the gaze is “stretched”, just like in Mallarmé’s poem, the white attention of the canvas combines with the white care of our mind and the lines and stains on the surface of the paintings start to resemble the layers of the Earth’s crust, slowly, the images of mountain peaks appear. The intangible movement of light between the shades of white never relinquishes the possibility that this meaning reached by a gaze “stretched” in time, might, at any moment, slip away and disappear into the void of an endless abyss. The pictorial language that Akagündüz creates with light, through its oscillation between emergence and disappearance, points to the materialisation of an unexpected void. In this sense, the “Kaf” paintings are located on a psychic threshold.

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In the “Kaf” series, Murat Akagündüz approaches the Earth’s topography as a hybrid artefact, a particular composition of nature, technology and culture, and not as a neutral and indifferent object. It is possible to trace this approach in the artist’s previous works. His 2012 solo exhibition “Hell-Heaven” juxtaposes digital videos with landscape oil paintings, creating an interplay of multi-directional gazes across the exhibition space. The viewer-subject who contemplates the landscapes in the “Homeland-Anatolia” series (2010–2012) is at the same time the object of the uncanny gazes of the moving bird eyes looking up from the monitors on the floor. The deconstruction of subject/object relationships staged in this way coincides with a reversal of the relations between human and non-human beings. The muddy flow of the river Euphrates projected on a large screen completes this installation, not as an indifferent, passive background, but as a figure, an external eye that brings into the exhibition space the larger perspective of flowing historical time and geography. The landscapes depicted in the “Danak” (2010) and “Turabdin” (2010–11) paintings represent on one hand nature as an artefact, on the other, the reintegration of cultural monuments covered by growing soil and plants back into topography. The paintings define a situation in which the natural and the social are undivided. In this sense, this is a reevaluation of topography as an artefact, a cultural product, and it carries the clues to the symbiosis between humankind and geological strata.

Akagündüz’s interest in topographic formations and the symbiosis between humankind and geological sediments is further emphasised in the paintings “Island Continent I” and “Island Continent II” (2011). These two paintings border on abstraction, coming closest to the “Kaf” series in terms of pictorial language. The monochromatic resin-on-canvas paintings closely scrutinize a topographical section. They withhold all information concerning the expanse from which the sections were cut off; their outlines dissolve into the white of the canvas near the edges. They are thus decontextualized and turned into abstract forms. Floating in a vacuum, they look like topographical portraits: they relate the traces time has left on the Earth’s crust with the lines and wrinkles of a face. These two paintings herald a transformation in Akagündüz’ contemplation of the Earth and his pictorial language, which maintains its relationship to landscape but gradually moves towards conceptualism. The line of the horizon has abandoned the picture plane and transitioned into the conceptual plane. In turn, landscape no longer describes an abstract spatial distribution between the sky and the Earth; it becomes a line depicting a fluid relationship between layers of human activity and topography.

A relationship between surfaces is also at work in the drawing series “Trace” produced simultaneously with the “Kaf” paintings. Just like in the “Kaf” paintings, these drawings on paper describe a process of emergence rather than the certainty of a form. They appear as a trace spreading through time in the mind, memory and eye of the viewer. What comes to the fore in these drawings is the trace of a touch, of a relationship the artist constructs between his bodily gesture and the materiality of the surfaces. These drawings are the image of the relationship between the front and back of the paper that constitutes their material support, the image of the relationship between the paper’s surface and the support it lies on. They show an embrace between the material conditions of drawing and the artist’s gesture. In this sense, the drawings can be read as a metaphor for the process that has been unfolding in Akagündüz’s paintings for some time now. This is the process I refer to as the retreat of the line of the horizon from the picture plane and its transition into the conceptual plane: what lies behind the vertical gaze of the “Kaf” series is the image of a relationship between surfaces. It is a suggestion regarding the way in which a gaze might be brought into form that brings into contact Google Earth, the topography of the Earth and the surface of the canvas as representational surfaces. What the artist is presenting is more than just the image of a mountain, it is an expression of the material and ideological conditions of visual representation.

This reflexive space opened up by Akagündüz also brings into focus the condition of vertigo on the ontological level: confronted with the finitude of the Earth as a consequence of the effects of its own activities spreading in the atmosphere and penetrating the geological layers, humankind is now forced to redefine its relationship with non-human things and beings. This space reflects all the difficulties humanity is experiencing in positioning itself today. The vertigo effect points to this moment where, having sealed its fate with advanced capitalism, with all its representational levels, the late modernist project has reached multiple material limits, most important of which are global ecological limits; a moment in which we are aware of the dissolution of our paradigms but have no idea as to what will replace them. No longer the centre, nor the unique scale of the universe, humankind faces multiple challenges announced by the crises of the modernist paradigm. This is the space of an ontological transformation brought about by the recognition of humankind as a geological factor, by the late acknowledgment of its activities according to timescales that surpass human life. It disrupts a fundamental cornerstone of modernity, the great divide between nature and culture as autonomous realms. The objectification of landscape that began with the invention of linear perspective and its centuries-long dominion, now affects the whole Earth, as the idea of unspoiled wilderness becomes obsolete. This new position of humankind functions like a Möbius strip: We can’t decide whether it is humankind that, through its newfound status as a threat, encompasses the Earth, or whether it is the Earth to which we owe our existence and our only shelter that encompasses humankind. The globe is no longer an indifferent nature or the “other” of human civilization. Faced with its own impact on the Earth’s systems, a sense of the sublime returns, freezing humankind between horror and admiration.

The vertigo effect felt under the loss of visual, physical and psychological reference points, in fact, expresses a crisis of meaning. It imposes that the person suffering from it find a new way of seeing the world, of creating a new perception and knowledge of the world that is not desensitized by habit. In this sense, it ushers in new possibilities. At this very point, instead of drifting along in a state of emergency, in a present constantly escaping from itself towards the future or sweeping the viewer off to an “elsewhere”, Akagündüz’s “Kaf” series invites us to stand still in the face of this “catastrophe of meaning”, to remain exposed to it, to perceive the possibilities it holds and to try to give them form.

*Installation photos by Ali Taptik

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Exhibition as Interpretation: Sarkis with Parajanov

This review was published in English and Turkish in Art Unlimited magazine, April 2016 and can be accessed online here. Photo credit: Laurent De Broca.

Sergei Parajanov – Sarkis Parajanian with his Armenian name - made his eponymous film Sayat Nova (The Colour of Pomegranates) paying tribute to the life and work of the 18th century troubadour (ashoug) and monk Sayat Nova, in 1969, in Soviet Armenia. A sumptuous, rhythmic assemblage of tableaux vivants composed of ritualistic gestures and folkloric objects, the film is an interpretation by Parajanov of the Caucasian, multi-lingual poet’s inner world, based on his poems. Banned by Soviet authorities at its release, it is celebrated as the filmmaker’s most thoroughgoing attempt at formal poetry in cinema.

Two years later in 1971 Sarkis, having since long left his natal Istanbul and settled in Paris, would create and exhibit his first piece camouflaged with carpets. This use of carpets and kilims as camouflage, holding in a protected resistance, originates in Sarkis’ early memories where these household items were used to cover windows at nightfall to prevent the electricity from showing outside to escape air raids. In the years to come, they would become a recurrent material in his installations, camouflaging resistance, radiating warmth and energy kept within.

Sarkis with Parajanov exhibition at the Villa Empain – Fondation Boghossian opens with a circular scene of 8 monitors placed on the floor facing outwards from under a pile of carpets from Anatolia, Persia and the Caucasus (I). 8 sequences from Sayat Nova selected by curator Erik Bullot are shown simultaneously on the screens. Interpreting ‘Sayat Nova’ (2015) doubles the film’s construction in tableaux and its temporal circularity. The sounds of different sequences join one another and greet the visitor with a symphony of different rhythms, human voices and various instruments from the film: the clock-work rhythm of carpet-weaving, the joyful song of a flute, the sound of water pouring over the stones of the monastery overlap. We find carpets inside Parajanov’s tableaux as well: they become curtains delineating a scene, or markers of the passing of time with a metronomic movement at the background of another one. Sarkis’ circular installation of carpets and monitors embraces and embodies Parajanov’s filmic compositions in the artist’s own, distinct language, compositions which in turn stage the poet Sayat Nova’s mind’s life in ritualistic, dream-like forms. The shape of the installation – the circularity and the covering of the 8 monitors with carpets – becomes a reference to the set-up of caravanserails here, a motif dear to Parajanov, but also to the nomadic settings of tents and temporary ceremonial structures in ancient Caucasus and Anatolia. As such, it expresses the temporary nature of Sarkis and Parajanov’s presence in this art deco building and at the same time frames the exhibition as a timespace for hosting in which the visitor becomes a guest. From Sarkis’ interpretation of Parajanov to the latter’s animation of Sayat Nova’s oeuvre, a burning and breathing core materializes in reverberations and wraps the guest in an atmosphere of meditation and ritualistic offering.

Interpreting ‘Sayat Nova’ stands at a central position within the exhibition and sheds light on the architectural setting. On a vertical axis, it is right beneath the glass dome of the building overarching the entire 2nd floor mezzanine where, under the rays of light pouring in from the open sky, Parajanov’s costume made of carpet pieces for the film Ashig Kerib (1988) hangs from above, between two floors, like a sacred vest with magical powers to coat the entire setting.

On a horizontal axis it opens the way to two additional installations. In the adjoining room, the Mise en scene with ‘the Portrait of Paradjanov’ (2015) is composed of two works, the portrait of Parajanov (2005-2009) clothed with a fabric coat and magnetic tapes of his films cascading down from its head stands behind Au commencement, Ryoan-ji (2000) playing in loop on a monitor on the floor (II). It is as though the discreet light of the candle on the screen and the sound of Cage’s piece, preserved and carried by the kilim, could, at any moment, begin to animate this totem-like creature. From these two scenes that greet the visitor, all the way towards the garden, in a rectangular hall, 126 Ikones of Sarkis are displayed inside a long glass vitrine. As Sarkis points out in the fragments of an interview with Bullot published in the catalogue, the ground floor is conceived as the ‘stage’ where works come alive and enter in dialogue, whereas the first floor operates like a theatre backstage with works facing each other, waiting for their turn to move into action (III). There, we find Parajanov’s props and collages alongside Sarkis’ costumes, films, vitrines and stained-glass works.

The cold materials and parsimonious colors of the building stand in contrast to the warmth and wealth of sounds and visual motifs and textures in the exhibition.

There is a sense a removal from the building’s architectural features that seem to float around the works without touching them. The building’s presence is repeatedly highlighted throughout the space and the texts accompanying the exhibition, but without ever penetrating Sarkis’ works and interpretations of Parajanov. This creates a strange disjunction, a putting of the building at a distance, which oddly ends up grounding the dialogue between the works and makes the building lose its solidity.

When put in dialogue in this way, the works of these two distinct artists start to emphasize certain aspects in each other, a form of contagion occurs. The dramatic effect of Parajanov’s films does not reside in the narrative that is staged but rather within the image compositions themselves, by repetitions of forms and juxtaposition of different temporalities through the interplay of background and foreground. Sarkis’ interpretation, by sequencing the film, distills this dramatic power in Parajanov’s image compositions. At times the tableaux in Sayat Nova stage unlikely combinations between the elements, like water and stone or wind and paper. At others we see human figures who interact with objects, animals and plants as tools, symbols and products; crushing grapes with their feet, weaving carpets, exchanging rings or tirelessly digging the ground of a monastery. It is not so much in acting out a play but rather in accomplishing minimal, repetitive gestures and using diverse objects that the actors embody these relationships that constitute the core of living cultural production. The estrangement produced by the slow unfolding of these minimal gestures and the unfamiliar points of view on these scenes draw them close to the performative aspects in Sarkis’ Ikones.

In Ikones, it is always the shape of the frame that determines the artist’s gesture which, in accordance with the object, actually works to defamiliarize it. Sarkis’ gestures that can be as minimal as a single watercolor fingerprint reinstate a distance within the object where a reflection on the fundamentals of our relationships with objects and their changing values in time and space occurs. What these gestures accomplish, quite like the infinitesimal changes in rhythm or a slight movement of the eyes or hands of an actor do in Parajanov’s scenes is this defamiliarization. The words of literary critic Viktor Shklovsky, a friend and collaborator of Parajanov, come to mind: “by enstranging objects and complicating form, the device of art makes perception long and laborious” (IV). Among the 126 Ikones at display here there is IK. 141 4.3.2003 (a Paradjanov), a late 19th century colorful Alsatian stained glass frame where Sarkis printed a black and white photograph of Parajanov, and his red watercolour fingerprint right where the man’s heart should be.

Key to understanding Sarkis’ relationship to objects is to approach them as repositories of memory. The moment an object loses its function or use value is the moment it becomes a cultural object, a collectible item that carries the memory of historical time. A similar transformation can be said about the works of an artist once they’re gone, once they are no longer here to interpret their own works. The objects Sarkis collects and displays in vitrines (two of which are part of this exhibition); as well as the works of other artists, musicians, filmmakers he frequently interprets or creates in dialogue with, are treasures of memory, but they are also treasures of war, of a war to keep the memory alive, a war against the reduction of these objects into a purely speculative value. “A device is a weapon. A camera is a weapon. Writing is a weapon”, he wrote as early as 1976 (V).

If “art is a means of experiencing the process of creativity”, then this is precisely what Sarkis with Parajanov achieves (VI). Georgian folk-tales, journeys of Armenian troubadours blending the music, rhythm and visual motifs embedded deep in the memory of the peoples of the Caucasus are brought back to life again and again in Parajanov’s films and artworks. In conversation with Sarkis’ gestures and installations, the joys and lamentations of peoples and objects across time gain form and reach our eyes and ears in a multitude of shapes and sounds.

I There are a total of three video installations in the exhibition, Interpreting ‘Sayat Nova’ (2015), Mise en scene avec ‘le Portrait of Paradjanov’ (2015) and Froid au dos (1993), all of which have the monitors placed on the floor and coated with carpets and kilims borrowed from a Belgian gallery and collection of oriental carpets, N. Vrouyr from Anvers.

II Portrait of Parajanov is the twin of a previous work by Sarkis, Les Maries (2004), which was produced during a residency in Armenia and installed at the Parajanov Museum during the exhibition “The Reflection and The Sublime”. In this first portrait of Parajanov, Sarkis had used fabrics he had found in the Museum, again with videotapes of Parajanov’s films.

III “Exhibitions are Interpretations. Sarkis Interview by Erik Bullot”, Sarkis with Parajanov, Exhibition Catalogue, p.14

IV Viktor Shklovsky, “Art as Device”, Theory of Prose, 1917, quoted in James Steffen, The Cinema of Parajanov, The University of Wisconsin Press, 2013, p.19.

V Sarkis, “Blackout Leica 1913-1973’ Uzerine Alinmis Notlardan Parcalar. Grunewald, Berlin”, Doxa (2), May 2006, Norgunk, Istanbul pp.16-20.

VI Viktor Shklovsky, Ibid.

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Reimagining Nature as Culture: Expanding the boundaries of making and thinking of art in the Anthropocene

The essay below was written upon the invitation of guest-editor Nazli Gurlek for the Spring 2016 issue of Arte East Quarterly. The full version including images and footnotes can be accessed here.

“Perhaps, the moon landing was one of the most demoralizing events in history” - Robert Smithson[i]

“We are being exposed to a catastrophe of meaning. Let’s not hurry to hide this exposure under pink, blue, red or black silks. Let us remain exposed, and let us think about what is happening to us: Let us think that it is we who are arriving, or who are leaving” - Jean Luc Nancy[ii]

It was in a symposium in 1970 that Robert Smithson cast his shadow of doubt over the preconceptions of ‘the moon landing’: perhaps all it did was to reveal what a closed system planet Earth was. Or for that matter, a ‘horrible pigpen’ of pollution, violence, blood and waste comparable to ‘the island’ in William Golding’s seminal novel Lord of the Flies[iii]. The image couldn’t be more relevant today as the Anthropocene is proposed as a new geological epoch marking the human impact on the Earth’s ecosystems. Faced with the specter of extinction, the theoretical debates surrounding the Anthropocene are caught between two opposing directions, namely in and out of the Earth. The futuristic fantasies of ‘transhumanism’ push the modernist logic to its extreme to achieve a human figure detached from nature by technological hybridization, residing in abstract networks of information, colonizing space and mining asteroids. On the other hand, much of contemporary philosophy and social sciences strive to make sense of the finitude of our planet and to recompose the ontological premises of modernism, such as the great divide between culture and nature forcing us to conceive the end of nature resulting human activities. How are we to account for the entanglement of mineral life and biological life, of cultural forms and nonhuman beings, of the timescales of human life and geology with our modernist knowledge and institutions? And more particularly, how do we understand contemporary art in the Anthropocene when both natural and social sciences, propelled by these questions, seem to be undergoing a paradigm shift[iv]? If there is any critical potential in this new grand narrative, it requires a deeper look into the particulars of historically and geographically located compositions and practices. Only then we can learn how to define the Anthropocene and to contextualize its encounters with art[v].

Bearing in mind these observations along with the speculative space that the “How to Think the Anthropocene?”[vi] conference in Paris opened up, the following is an attempt at reading two bodies of recently produced art works ― Study for a Monument (2013-present) by Toronto-based Abbas Akhavan and Who carries the water (2014-ongoing) by Istanbul-based İz Öztat & Fatma Belkıs. Both works suggest new configurations tying humans to nonhumans, recent history to geological time, political violence to environmental factors within systems of meaning where nature and culture appear in a complex entanglement. Standing against the pull of a ‘future perfect continuous tense’[vii] that evades the forces of gravity of both the present and the local, they are anchored in the topographies of the Middle East, and critically engage with the historical building of museums and exhibitions within the wider context of modernism.

Initially commissioned by the Abraaj Group Art Prize[viii], Abbas Akhavan’s Study for a Monument consists of a series of bronze cast plant specimens. Spread horizontally on white cotton sheets on the floor, each species is represented by its constitutive parts (stem, leaves, and petals) similar to botanical plates whose scales are blown up to human proportions. Traced by the artist in the collections of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh and the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew[ix], they are native to the region lying between the rivers of Euphrates and Tigris (Ancient Mesopotamia or present-day Middle East) known for its much-coveted fossil resources. The destruction of salt marshes by Saddam Hussein to control resisting marsh Arabs, and the Gulf War have drastically transformed their native habitat. The oxidized color of bronze and imperfections resulting from the casting process in Akhavan’s work give these plants a post-apocalyptic feeling and a look of petrified fossils at the same time. The sculptures are at once buried and unburied much like the memory of war in this land. This simultaneous movement of sedimentation and unearthing encapsulates the geological time, centuries of colonial expropriation, post-9/11 asymmetrical warfare as well as the lifespans of plants and human beings. They convey a sense of loss crawling back from past times and a form of evidence for an ongoing catastrophe. The birth of the Neolithic with its bronze weaponry and domestication of species is seconds away; the history of conflicts over pipelines seems to extend forever.

The display of Study for a Monument is simultaneously reminiscent of forms of legal exhibit, scientific evidence and funerary rituals (the white sheets alluding to cotton burial clothes). Through this sculptural gesture Akhavan brings into critical focus at once the history of museums rooted in the 19th century modernism and the contemporary commodification of artworks in global circulation with their relevant condition reports. The historical construction of the art field is inseparable from that of the modern museum and its exhibition formats, namely by abstracting things from their ‘living’ contexts and displaying them for the viewers’ gaze. The viewer experience inside the museum is a subjectivity-forming experience: it calls for the reproduction of that same abstraction process in the spectator’s mind and body[x]. Referenced by Akhavan in his research, the European natural history museums, for example, are places where this regime of scientific objectivity, the stabilizing effect it produces on the material world, the gaze it calls for along with the observing modern subject were born. The contemporary art gallery, on the other hand, pushes this abstraction to the extremes by ‘purifying’ works of art from any cognitive or perceptual interference from the outer world[xi]. Condition reports, mentioned earlier, are also constitutive of this process: required by the global circulation of artworks as commodities, they submit works of art to a quasi-scientific scrutiny, establishing their status as ‘pure objects’ to be displayed inside the ‘white cube’. Through their display, the plant sculptures become the site where distinct histories converge and multiple abstractions are disclosed, revealing the underlying modernist constructions around museums and contemporary art exhibitions.

The size and material of Akhavan’s sculptures also reference the history of public monuments and statues as ‘dead people cast in bronze’[xii], erected, replaced or destroyed over the course of recent political changes. The plant species in this work are monumentalized and broken down at the same time, reminiscent of two seemingly opposing conceptions of nature that coexist in contemporary discourses: its exploitation as a resource and its reification as a space to be preserved. There is a spatial and temporal unfolding of the work in one’s mind: images of mass funeral ceremonies; public statues, vandalized, demolished and dragged through streets; species and entire ecosystems imagined as future fossils; human bodies, plants and artworks displayed lifeless on white sheets for us to see, commemorate, witness and attest. By activating multiple contexts, Study for a Monument extends its scope beyond the exhibition’s own time and space, and accomplishes what Jean Luc Nancy calls for: to remain exposed to catastrophe in the face of a ‘mastery over nature’ gone mad that “bends under its power not only lives in great number (...) but ‘life’ in its forms, relationships, generations and representations”[xiii].  

There is a cognitive trap in conceiving nature either as a resource to be mastered or pure space to be preserved, which reiterates the modernist divide between nature and culture. Expanding the boundaries of artistic practice through ethnographic research, İz Öztat and Fatma Belkıs redefine the way our contemporary culture constructs what it means to be human by extending the condition of humanity to nonhuman beings and recognizing them as partners in co-creating the world. Recently commissioned by the 14th Istanbul Biennial, Who carries the water (2014-ongoing) is an installation composed of multiple pieces including Will Flow Freely (2015-ongoing), a series of naturally dyed and woodcut printed kerchiefs hung on hazelnut sticks; Actions That Do Not Benefit The Country (2015), an installation of hazelnut sticks, carobs and beeswax; In The Rivers North of The Future (2014-ongoing), a series of watercolors on paper, and Scapegoat (2015), a basket woven with crafted hazelnut sticks and carobs. An eponymously titled text accompanies these works crystallizing the key issues that are explored in the installation[xvi]. Culmination of a year-long research and multiple field trips to valleys across Turkey that witnessed many resistances against the construction of run-of-the-river hydroelectric power plants since 1998[xiv], the work draws on the local community’s struggles against the privatization of their environment and relies on anonymous local knowledge as well as the practices of commoning in its production processes, materials and forms[xv].

This multivocal and performative text is told by a number of humans and nonhuman participants in dialogue form. What is significant here is that, the representation of the landscape and its elements cease to provide a backdrop for the human figures and their actions, while the river, trees, goats and the fog become actual figures with their own voices and actions. Human beings in turn fade into this new texture as they enter into a mimetic fusion with the landscape[xvii]. When the flow of the river is interrupted, the peasant is tongue-tied. When the river flows into the pipeline instead of its natural bed, the philosopher loses the metaphors to create concepts. And the spruce, when fog disappears, is advised by the psychologist to seek refuge in fairytales, a human-made cultural form.

Through these transitions among human bodies and minds, natural elements and cultural forms, the classical figure/background hierarchy disappears and a dense texture made of relations emerges, in which the local inhabitants, the outsider researchers, plants and animals, tales and cognitive processes, natural elements and technical tools are all embedded and act upon one another as constituents of a relational ontology[xviii]. This web of relations binds not only beings, bodies, objects and language from the valleys, but also the artists themselves and their work. By using materials and techniques that are in a mutualistic relationship with the ecosystems and refuse to use electricity in the production process and display, the artists multiply the contexts of inscription of the work creating a critical continuum between a biennial and experimental practice and research in alternative economies.

Museums and biennials still stand as the sites where post-capitalist modernity constantly furthers the limits of its own operations of abstraction and reflects back on itself by allowing for repressed forms of relationality between objects, humans and nonhuman beings to resurface. This usually comes at the cost of perpetuating the epistemic divide between what we see in an exhibition and the world we live in, while conserving the stabilizing effect of the exhibition on the material world[xix]. The absence of electricity in the display of Who carries the water that might seem as a simple gesture at first breaks with the modernist exhibition design providing a space of abstraction, and instead, it inscribes the work in a continuum with the outside world. The contrast achieved within the biennial framework in turn sheds critical light on the objectifying effects of display conventions. Through Öztat and Belkıs’ refusal to use electricity, along with the dedication of all the works to the public domain[xx], Who Carries the Water can be interpreted as a performative gesture that operates at the threshold between art, ethnography and political engagement. Moreover, it lays the grounds of an indigenous framework for a potentially decolonizing thought and practice on art and museums in the Anthropocene[xxi].

Engaged in the questions posed by the Anthropocene, many critical debates and exhibition practices today highlight the role of research and contextualize exhibition making as an interdisciplinary space that triggers an understanding of complex ecological changes affecting the world[xxii]. The challenge then is to adjust our thinking about museums as incubators of research and artistic practice shaping our subjectivities and understandings of our relationship to the material world. While İz Öztat and Fatma Belkıs’s Who Carries the Water takes inspiration from forms of indigenous resistance to activate new potentials for change within the contemporary institutions, Abbas Akhavan’s sculptural installation Study for a Monument reveals the commodification of art and its mechanisms. The latter also brings together humans and nonhumans in the memory of violence in the Middle East and in the historical construction of our cultural institutions. Refusing to ignore the political potential around multiple crises announced by the Anthropocene these works demand us to articulate the existing relationships between culture and nature as well as the political implications of exhibition forms and institutional practices...

[masliseven]

Catalog Essay

The following text was written for Burcu Yagcioglu’s solo exhibition “Born of the Interface” and published in the accompanying catalog by Galerist, December 2015.

Dear Burcu,

A while ago I started to write down these dialogues in my mind. They’re actually not dialogues, but monologues, I just choose an imaginary interlocker. Right now it’s you.

Our conversation reminds me of Videodrome (1). It’s actually you who reminded me of Videodrome, a few months ago. I put it on last night, and there was this statement in it about how technology brings about a form of monologue. Brian O’blivion doesn’t converse with anyone, he sends out videotapes instead and prefers monologue as a form of discourse. It’s also in the whole structure of the film, this relationship we have with technology, where we think devices are “the other”, in a way we are in search of alterity and we try to find it in our own creation, but constantly fail. This loop of techno-scientific inventions feeds speculative narratives around the transformation of our most basic biological functions as humans; we become enmeshed with technological devices. The term “new flesh” sums up this idea. But Brian O’blivion prefers this to be a monologue. I kept thinking, doesn’t the same thing apply to our relationship with nature? Are plants, animals and natural elements really fully “others” to us or do we simply project our identity on them? What is this culture we’ve produced based on all the natural forms that surround us? Is there ever an alterity of nature to what we are that would produce a dialogue instead of a monologue? Do we ever get out of the monologue?

With this question in mind, I turned back to Donna Haraway (2). This sense of constant monologue actually originates from the historically situated perspective of Modernism in its productive stance. Inside the modernist paradigm, human figure and culture appear as categories that are autonomous from nature. Man, enlightened by Reason, is “self-born”. Separate from the world, he is fascinated with his phallocentric mind that orders civilization and marches on towards the future. In this paradigm it becomes possible to conceive of both nature and technology as separate, autonomous and pure sites through which this enlightened Man converses with himself, always projecting his Reason upon things and beings. This does seem too narrow a description of the world we live in. Do you think Brian O’blivion is conservative? Monocular is the word that comes to my mind. I clearly write this in opposition to the more complex version of the story, the Latourian one (3) where things get complicated: In practice we (‘moderns’) constantly hybridize and in theory we purify. There is a continuous translation from one side to the other of this artificial divide as we rationalize with theory and live in constant repression of our hybrid monsters.

Haraway brings these repressed monsters back into focus. She recalibrates the terms of the relationship of human beings to nature, culture and technology when she posits that science is culture for example, or in her oft-cited concept “natureculture”. In her terms, there has never been a nature that was pure, a nature outside of its cultural-technological construction. She goes further and proposes this idea of nature as an ‘artefactual co-construction’ among humans and non-humans, and in her definition of non-humans we find self-governing machines; transgenic mice born in labs; technologies of visualization; and language, in terms of available metaphors, scientific reports and narratives of all kinds. Once we fully recognize these “material-semiotic actors” as our partners in making the world, doesn’t this become a dialogue? What exactly does this recognition entail?

Your ovarian teratoma acts like one of these “material-semiotic actors” throughout the exhibition. In conversation with it you have co-constructed this universe of forms and meanings. I see here two things that inform the exhibition in its entirety. First, it is the idea of genetic error as the source of a monstrous growth produced and hosted by your body, but in its logic of replication, ends up separating itself as an organism. Through its surgical removal and transformation into a work of art, it becomes the hybrid monster that keeps generating metaphors and concepts that lie at the core of Born of the Interface. It is organic and lodged in your ovary; it replicates reproductive functions but cannot reproduce. It draws all of its creative potency from this position that makes biological reproduction, genetic error and bio printing technologies converse. It liquefies and confounds purified categories of biology, technology and culture. This liquefaction is also clear in the way you frame the two drawings Manufactured and Untitled. Something always leaks out, the body of the drawing and the inner frame are displaced. The substance in your drawings moves across and through these multiple frames that coexist in an oblique way.

Second is the zone of transitions you create between your physical body and the body of works we see in Born of the Interface. The teratoma is neither ‘self’ nor ‘other’ but occupies a zone in-between and creates a sense of abjection. It is unclean and inappropriate, it is precisely that which we do not want to see, because it tickles our repressed desire for monsters (4).  The teratoma is at once a biomedical organism and a cultural artifact. Abstracted from your body and erected into a monument, it becomes the metaphor governing the artworks you produced, but also going further, it is your partner in deciphering the biotechnoculture in which we live. In its organic replication of reproductive tissues it approaches another kind of organic tissue, this time technologically produced, the 3D bioprinted skin. These two types of tissue are joined by a common denominator: while, in themselves, they are replicas that can only produce ‘sameness’, they both compose with organic matter and give birth to hybrid formations, the evolution of which holds an unknown element.  

This hybridization brings me back to Videodrome, to what happens in the interface between the screen and the user. In the end, it is a video signal that penetrates through the eye, ignites a tumor in the brain and induces hallucinations of bio-tech fusion for whomever is exposed, ultimately transforming them into the new flesh. In recognizing the tv screen as an ‘actant’, as a partner in love and crime, and in surrendering to its action, Max steps into the future. It seems to me that in your construction, the 3D bio printed artificial skin is the “new flesh”. In Manufactured, the image of an artificial skin is held between human hands in a position of display, intentionally exposed to a screen, to be seen and attested. With the ocean in the background, the whole setting is reminiscent of Haraway’s prehistoric monster Ichthyostega, the first creature “to crawl out of the amniotic ocean into the future” – in that unseparated zone between species where it is “no longer fish and not yet salamander”. It is obviously an element of “artefactual co-construction”, born of the interface between biological discourse, technological devices and human culture. So are the little monsters in the video Dreams of Autonomy, the gif animated insects and dogs that crawl out of this visualization of your teratoma surgery and start running, each in its own direction, yearning to be recognized as autonomous beings, our partners in creating this world of technobioculture.

Similarly, you are not here. I’m addressing an imaginary version of you that resides in my mind. In the end it is a question of shifting perspective. The minute we recognize alterity and treat these imaginary or actual hybrid beings as our interlockers is the minute dialogue becomes possible and language is unlocked - we regain power over the horror as soon as we embrace its action upon us and compose with it.  

1.David Cronenberg (writer & director), 1983. 

2.Donna Haraway, The Horoway Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 2004). Especially the chapters “The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics For Inappropriate/d Others” (pp.63-124) and “Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden” (pp.151-198) are relevant for this discussion.

3.Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993)

4.For more on horrors and powers of abjection, see Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror. An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982)

[masliseven]

“I Have Felt the Sacred Shudder and Did Not Even Pay For It”

What follows is an interview with Paul Chan over several emails, published in Turkish by XOXO Magazine, May 2015. 

The title of your Hugo Boss Prize exhibition at the Guggenheim is Nonprojections For the New Lovers, a series of artworks and a series of erotica novels published by Badlands Unlimited. How do Nonprojections and The New Lovers (books and reading event) coexist in the Guggenheim? Are the books taking central stage?

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The Hugo Boss Prize came after some years of relative break you took from the art world. Do you feel renewed?

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Thinking from Nonprojections back to the Arguments series, there seems to be a move from film and animation towards the more rudimentary elements of light, electricity and air. Does this mark a "going back to basics" approach to matter and perception?

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You created a 3D plan of the exhibition featured on YouTube, in which the exhibition is inhabited by a diverse and colorful public of men, women, penguins, couples gay and straight, children, dancers, dogs, cats, a person on a wheelchair, a drag and a skater among others, with a seemingly indifferent attitude towards the works on display. What are this 3D plan and its public "representative" of?

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Nonprojections operate like triggers for imagination, so do books. What are your thoughts about audience, in terms of the difference that may exist between an audience of exhibitions and an audience of readers?

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The output of Badlands Unlimited ranges from artist books to e-publications, exhibitions and stone books. It seems like an unexpected combination of unlimited reproduction, download and dispersion on one hand and limited editions and unique pieces of monumental posture on the other. What is the underlying approach to authorship and objecthood behind this array of formats?

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You state Maurice Girodias’ Olympia Press as an inspiration for the new erotica series. Olympia Press operated in a context of censorship and the decision to publish erotica was as financial as politically motivated. Is there a similar motivation behind New Lovers in terms of politics of desire?

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Why do you think Erotic Romance is the future? What kind of a future?

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In medieval Europe, public readings were the central mode of diffusion of books, most written texts passed through human voice. Could sound diffusion be a future interest for Badlands Unlimited?

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You staged Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot, in post-Katrina New Orleans. Did that experience have an impact on your decision to venture into publishing, an equally collaborative practice?

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Your overall practice is one of fragmentation, breaks and unexpected re-compositions: in your video essay from 2003, Baghdad In No Particular Order, one of the scenes shows a pile of books on sale, lying on the street, with the camera focusing on the covers and pages of these mostly Western references before focusing on the bookseller (somehow reminds me of Olympia Press). You announced a ‘break’ from the art world and founded the publishing house Badlands Unlimited in 2010, released Saddam Hussein's early writings on democracy in 2012.  

Is there a sense of urgency that threads through these resurgences and diverse fields of activity?

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There is an increasing attention towards corporate sponsorship in the art world with museums and some recent biennials being criticized for socially 'irresponsible' funding. How are you experiencing the effects of the Hugo Boss prize?

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[masliseven]

Imagining an Island

The below text was written for Hera Buyuktasciyan’s solo exhibition “The Land Across the Blind” and published in her artist book with the same title, in May 2014.

According to legend, Byzas of Megara followed the oracle of Delphi's prophecy that he would settle in the lands “across the blind”, sailing across the northern Aegean to found the city of Byzantion in 7th century B.C.

The prophecy unfolds in multiple movements. One is in the promise of a land that is yet to be seen, not just by discovery through voyage, but more importantly through the actualization of a capacity to see. This capacity, which is also promised to Byzas, eludes the metaphorically blind people of Chalcedon. Another movement has to do with the experience of time. Putting aside our retrospective point of view, we take that of Byzas sailing in search of this new land, not knowing where the journey will take him. His journey oscillates between these words that are now engraved in his mind, and a vision of the future, which is yet to be found. He will fully experience the present, but that moment will only come once he sets his eyes on what he knows to be the land across the blind. It is as though the land exists in order that he may see. It will be the moment of fulfillment, which, in this sense, is a moment of both discovery and creation.

Departing from the legend itself, one can speculate about the movement between land and sea. The Greek word “Pelagos” defines the open sea in terms of visibility, as a point from which one can no longer see any piece of land. It is no coincidence then that the promised land that bestows Byzas with sight comes in the form of a peninsula, a place where water and land meet.

An archeology of seeing

Hera Buyuktasciyan created a short video in 2012 during a residency in Munich, entitled “In Vision”. The video shows the ceramic figurine of a boy with his left hand posed against his forehead, trying to look at a distant view and see despite a blinding source of light—or so it seems. The frame is symmetrical and the figurine is placed in the middle of two windows that slowly open and close for 2 minutes and 12 seconds, expanding and compressing both the figurine's and our field of vision. Beyond the windows we see trees, which seem to change their shape with every movement of the windows. The light source is reflected and slides from one window to the other as they close and open again and again. Oddly, the video seems to borrow from the binocular mechanism of our vision, alluding to a series of visual devices such as binoculars and glasses. At times the sun reflects from the right window, hinting that the figurine must be directly facing it. We think that the light must be blinding. Both absolute dark and absolute light are blinding and it seems that vision exists somewhere in between. Between dark and light, between one eye and the other.

At one point or another we all have carried out the basic experiment of closing one eye and trying to see with our left or right eye only, with the simple purpose of experiencing the distinct difference of perspective between these two. We have asked the following questions: why is there a difference between the vision of my left eye and the vision of my right eye? Where am I located exactly and why is my vision seamless despite the split perspectives? These questions have been at the core of art, literature and science for centuries, culminating in the creation of mythical creatures such as the Cyclops and the Greek epithet Panoptes (‘all-seeing’). Notably this gave rise to diverse strategies of perspective in the arts and a panoply of visual instruments mimicking the duality and movement of vision throughout the 18th and 19th centuries—just a few steps before the invention of cinema.

The stereoscope was one such instrument, in that it imitated the mechanism of binocular movement. To give a sense of ‘real vision’, the stereoscope aimed at achieving depth by superimposing two images which had slightly different perspectives. At a time when mass tourism was only at its beginning, the device served as an escape into the extraordinary physically out of reach but made visible to the eye through the seeing machine. Since then, the transformation of what is physically ‘out of reach’ due to distance in time or in space into something visible due to scientific and technological advancement has exponentially increased. When we pose our eyes on Hera’s stereoscope, we do not only experience our own vision by overlapping two slightly different perspectives, but the resulting image conveys an additional sense of disorientation, as if two different planes of sight or two different moments in time and space were overlapping. This kind of overlapping no longer seems to refer only to our vision of the world surrounding us, but to a movement that complements the latter, an image composed of differing moments in time and space, mentally constructed and projected onto the world, a different kind of “elsewhere”—an imagined one. Carefully drawn portions of these overlapping views of building tops are tinted in blue, adding to our sense of dislocation. What is this blue? Is it the color of water or the color of sky? Does it delineate an underwater realm or an imaginary world? Has this anything to do with the subconscious? Is it a repository of forgotten memory or an unknown space yet to be imagined? From the binocular movement of the eyes, we pass on to the movement between the physical world and the imagination. In this moment of confusion, both the mind and the body become involved in seeing.

This back-and-forth movement between the physically visible reality and the mental space where memory, experience and imagination overlap, stands out as a constant focus in Hera’s practice over the years, not just in most of her works but also in her artistic process. Transitional spaces between inside and outside, balconies have been objects of study in her drawings, installations and research for some time now.

Henri Lefebvre describes the balcony as a space that ‘admirably’ situates one simultaneously inside and outside and whose invention we owe to the ‘putting into perspective’ of the street. The aim is to get a hold of something that is not entirely visible – in understanding the rhythms of a city, one has to see and hear, but also to dive into one’s mind and memory and proceed through abstraction towards a deeper understanding of form. The balcony is the place “par excellence” for such an endeavor, offering elevation and an “all-seeing” perspective together with a remoteness from the surrounding city. In return, it is also the place where one is exposed. There is a reciprocity of vision, every line of sight runs two ways: seeing has to do with simultaneously being seen, with being a visible body that exists and moves among all the other visible objects in the universe.

In Hera’s “Studies for Elevation”, the balcony is no longer an architectural component that stretches out from the body of a building into the surrounding world. It is an independent structure standing on its feet. At times it has wheels and seems to be moving with the wind, at other times its railings move up and down, left and right, always indicating a looming change in perspective. Hera’s surreal balconies are like islands. They denote a state of being and a vision of the world in which seeing means becoming, and that is constantly attached to the invisible, to something that escapes every single perspective and remains hidden. It is no coincidence that Byzantine iconography has been a research focus throughout Hera’s early works up to our day, with its recognition of the ‘invisible’, its technique of rendering visible what Renaissance perspective conceals and its attachment to imitation by a body that allows itself to become one with the world rather than the abstract representation of a disconnected eye and mind.

Becoming an island

I sometimes imagine Hera standing at a balcony and contemplating the city she inhabits, listening to the silences and looking at all the invisible layers of history, through destruction and reconstruction, the movement of people and objects in time. She lives on one of the Prince’s Islands just offshore of Istanbul and travels daily through the sea, to get to the heart of the city. In her everyday life and in her travels, she carries a number of tiny, wooden structures she produced herself, in the forms of a balcony, a ladder, sometimes a dock. She takes photographs of these connecting devices in various spaces, over the canals of Venice, at the feet of the Four Tetrarchs at San Marco, on the rooftop of an old bazaar in Sultanahmet or hanging from the mossy walls of an abandoned building in Galata. She then puts them back in her bag and leaves these places with the photographs in her camera. All the spaces she discovers, as well as the photographs, constitute a landscape in her mind, connections built with these tiny sculptures of a balcony, a ladder and a dock. There seems to be a constant tension between a drive to connect and another drive to separate. Like imagining an island, her movement appears to be at once an act of self-isolation from the world, and of creation of a new set of connections to make a portion of the world “visible”. There is an affinity between the way we imagine islands—which are separate from the world and offer a ground zero to start over, a unique vantage point into the world—and the way we create and use concepts. These tools of the mind are connected to the earthly things they intend to explain but are ontologically isolated from them.

In ‘The Land Across The Blind’, the blue taint of the stereoscopic images are repeated in other drawings and throughout the gallery space, covering the first floor of the gallery and now suggesting an underwater realm where the debris of a balcony stands still, a thick rope dives in from the window, reaches the ground next to it and leaves way to a bronze chain, anchored within the cistern. The setting is reminiscent of the Freudian analogy between psychoanalysis and archeology. We seem to be standing inside a layer of the unconscious. The ruin of a balcony seems to stand for a perspective long lost and forgotten, a sunken item of the past. The anchor in the cistern seems to be pointing at the existence of other layers further down, an underground we cannot yet see, that carries ruins of distant times buried even deeper.

Underground water cisterns and canals of Istanbul have been such an area of interest in Hera’s practice, as sites where she locates herself to question the relationship between the visible surface of things and their invisible, hidden meanings. A cistern hidden underneath a rug shop in Sultanahmet that by word-of- mouth serves as an ‘unofficial’ tourist destination, or the mouth of the hidden cistern beneath the building of Galeri Mana that was first opened up and inhabited by one of Hera’s installations are such spaces that become ‘visible’ through her gaze. The invisible realm of underground water as an element that conceals and reveals, connects and separates is also the source of many myths and urban legends surrounding the city and its connection to an obscured Byzantine past, never fully excavated—the scattered fragments of which we keep stumbling upon whenever we try to construct something new.

Upstairs, just above the surface, a wooden dock leads to the balcony of the building, where we find the thick rope again, this time wrapped around the balcony. As each wooden plank moves slowly up and down we feel that something must be floating. The planks start to feel like ship oars. The dock is an almost musical piece. A silent rhythm emanates from these movements. Is this the rhythm of a cruise? Is this some form of music for the eyes? Are we about to set sailing? The building in which we move and breathe seems to be stretched between this silent movement ahead and the remnants of a past, anchored deep in an underwater realm. We could be in a ship, we could be moving between land and sea.

[masliseven]

Barbara & Zafer Baran: Işığı Yakalamak

L’Officiel Hommes Haziran 2014 sayısında yayınlanmıştır.

Şili’li astronom Gaspar Galaz “Şimdiki zaman yoktur” der, ve açıklar: ay ışığının gözlerimize ulaşması bir saniyeden fazla zaman alır, güneş ışığı ise sekiz dakika.

“Şimdiki zaman ince bir eşiktir” diyerek devam eder, “bir üfleyişte yok olabilir”. Patricio Guzman’ın 2012 tarihli “Nostalgia for the Light” adlı belgeseli Şili’deki Atakama çölünde, astronomi ve arkeoloji arasında bir ağ örer. Şiirsel bir dille zamanın mekanla olan ilişkisini aktarır ve insanların yukarı, gece gökyüzüne bakarak ve aşağıya, yeryüzünde toprağın gizlediği şeyleri kurcalayarak hikayeler yaratma alışkanlıklarını anlatır.

Barbara ve Zafer Baran’ın fotoğraflarında benzer bir hareket söz konusu: objektiflerini bir yandan gökyüzüne doğrultup yıldızların ve ayın ışığını kaydederlerken, diğer yandan yeryüzünü kaplayan bitkilerin ve canlı hayatın en mikroskopik hareketlerini izlerler. Yıldız ve Ay Çizimleri serisi çıplak gözlerimizin yakalayamadığı, ışığın uzayda, zaman ve mekan içinde ilerleyen yolculuğunu aktarır. Zaman bu fotoğrafların da temel bir öğesidir: kamerayı hareket ettirerek ışığı bir kalem gibi kullandıkları çalışmalar uzun poz süreleri gerektirir. Odak noktasını gece gökyüzünden yeryüzüne çevirdiklerinde ise bitkilerin yaşam döngüsünü, doğum, üreme ve ölüm anlarını, yine çıplak gözün algılayamadığı ancak fotoğraf makinesinin mikroskopik kaydının mümkün kıldığı bir yöntemle takip ederler. Ephemera serisi bitkilerin gizli yaşamı, gözle görünmeyen organları ve yeryüzünde hayatın döngüsel hareketiyle ilgilidir. Çürüyen manolya yapraklarının yakın plan çekimleri uzaydaki nebula görüntülerini andırır, akasma bitkisinin tohum başları ise hem hareket halindeki gök cisimlerinin yeryüzünden görünüşünü, hem de okyanus diplerinde ışıldayan planktonları düşündürür. İki fotoğraf serisi arasındaki bu biçim benzeşmesi gündelik hayatlarımıza dalıp unuttuğumuz, Baranlar’ın fotoğraflarına bakarken hatırlayıp heyecan duyduğumuz temel bir fizik prensibini hatırlatıyor: Bitkiler kadar bizler de yıldıztozundan oluşuyoruz; bu gezegende hayatı mümkün kılan tüm elementler yıldızların merkezinde gerçekleşen reaksiyonlarda oluşuyor.

Fotoğraf makinesinin icadında mağara çizimlerinden bugüne insanoğlunun kendi gördüğüyle, görüntü yaratma dürtüsü arasında gidip gelen zihinsel hareketi ve modernist bir merak olan kendi görüşünü genişletme, göremediğini görünür kılma isteği yatar. Baranlar’ın fotoğraf mecrasını kullanımlarında ve ışıkla kurdukları deneysel ilişkide güncel bir eşik oluşturmak adına bu temel harekete, minimal bir anlayışa geri dönüş sezilir.