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
