A collage made using a photograph by Joyce Wieland and images from the Michael Snow’s film La Région Centrale, by Naci Emre Boran.[/caption]

Naci Emre Boran

Introduction

The viewers encounter Michael Snow’s La Région Centrale (1971) at the top of a mountain in Quebec. Before La Région Centrale, most of Snow’s films depicted interior spaces, using single camera movements, including Standard Time (1967), Wavelength (1967), and Back and Forth (1968). La Région Centrale could be interpreted as the camera’s attack on human consciousness and thinking, whereby the camera is controlled by a preprogrammed machine on top of a mountain untouched by humans, using almost all of the possibilities and directions of movement. This denunciation does not fully represent cybernetics’s move to control philosophical thinking; it is rather geared towards negating the gaze’s determination of the meaning of the movement only through its telos. Contrasted with a person’s calculating thinking, a calculated algorithm serves a role not too dissimilar to how rational thought was meant to be liberating back in the day.

Metaphysics — which perceive things as what exist to be used, separating them into material and form — , and the perpetrating subject approach — a partner to metaphysics — , have been strengthened by the existence of technical prowess as a force of production in life. The existence of technical prowess’s within the realm of art open up an important critical field pertaining to this perpetration. The viewers are able to experience the constructed aesthetics of the art work both materially and formally, and its going beyond the duality of the object-subject, only insofar as the field that cinema opens up, owing its existence to the prowess of technique. La Région Centrale, as a video-film, controversially uses the technique of constraint by turning the gaze of the act of looking on itself, without an event. Through this constraint, one is expelled from the safety of existing perceptions. When being displaced results in regaining a home, thus establishing a new world, it is then possible to encounter a new way of seeing in the film.

La Région Centrale

To view La Région Centrale with the experience and thoughts that stem from the gaze of the every day, without utilizing the position Snow holds in the history of experimental and avant-garde cinema, will help viewers come closer to the anxiety to counter the holistic look of the existing systems.

Viewers today still see in a way that belongs to the presiding paradigm. The screen that functions as a shield for people who assume that everything exists for them and who thus have a shared language: [1] Everything seems to be normal for now; the viewers’ eyes are wondering across rocky terrain. This situation lasts a bit too long. This “too” will become the foundational element of La Région Centrale, but the viewers are not aware of this yet. The camera moves up and down, accompanied by an analogue sound. It becomes useless to think about what is going to happen next. For a moment, it feels like what is being shown is the stage of the documentary that talks about the “earth.” But this is a lifeless world; this is the earth that we are familiar with. A while later, the thing that is known to be the earth is replaced by the surface of the earth: It is as if viewers are encountering the face of a person that they thought they knew, but who they later realized was a stranger. The stones’ being stones is suspended, forms and colors begin to be visible on their own. What is on the screen is what is right there, as the ominousness that the world seems to have fallen into is being presented: The perspective is from top of a hill, it is a rocky terrain and landscape. The small gestures of the frame are reminiscent of a trip when the destination is reached without any of the passengers realizing, even if they were looking out the window the whole time. The familiar knot between movement and time of perception is also dismantled here. We encounter the horizon line, the foundation of perspective, which is inherited from the Renaissance. It is difficult to shed this gaze. The viewers are separated from the human eye; they dethrone a line that needs to be able to place objects where required. After a while, the real owner of the image becomes visible: The shadow of the machine that controlled the camera is a reminder that as the subverted gaze is a machine-gaze. The formal gaze that is resisted on the earth is replaced by the ambiguity of the sky through camera movements. Viewers become strangers to the sky in a similar way. But this encounter is more difficult, because boundaries and colors are intermingled and the fall into a void where the analogue sound is needed to be able to understand that the camera moves. And that sound will also be removed from the signified, just like the emptying out of the visual signifieds.

The feeling that the beginning fragment is the warmup for a three-hour struggle with our already-existing mode of seeing creeps up, pushing the boundaries of our tolerance. The durations of the sections are going to be complementing a movement that can be identified. It is possible to say that the shield of the screen is down. As perception’s effort to produce meaning keeps failing, our patience is tested. Some fragments emerge in our minds: the question of “what is the use of the horizon?” appears and disappears in the mind, as the camera focuses on the horizon-line and turns around itself. The camera turns to the sky and then to the earth, subverting the positionings of the earth and the sky. The camera evokes the act of scanning, reminding viewers that they should stop seeking horizontal movements, that there is nothing that can be found other than what is seen. While forgetting the current situation, it is also impossible to define where the perspective of looking is. The light and color that we cannot capture, as if we are on a ferris wheel, ransack our sense of balance. The shifting position of the camera on the coordinates of x, y, z, the different momentums of the swivel, the approaching and receding focus are added on. In the meantime, the only familiar element of temporality is the sky getting darker. We realize that the ball of light that wanders across the screen is the light of the night, the moon. As our tested patience tells us that night, which ends the day, will also end the film, the viewers are not fooled into believing that. The image that “tires” the eyes subverts the expectations that are there despite the light — expectations which are projected on to the lightness and the darkness.

When the end is reached, the fatigue of overcoming some things that have not been defined. There is the feeling of ease for having been deported. The quick movements of the camera converge the form and the ground: objects become drawings: depths and heights become colors. It is obvious that a sense of well-being could not be established, but perhaps the end of patience could be the language that moves from representation to expression: Black holes on the Earth / I’m not dizzy any more.

Conclusion

La Région Centrale intends to decipher the human-constructed world’s way of looking through the machine’s eye in addition to the inherent tension between reality and fiction in the medium of cinema. The a priori conditions of the dominant paradigm of seeing, such as space and time, are transformed into the ground on which another mode of seeing is reconstructed when the causality of movement is questioned. La Région Centrale interrupts the relationship between the camera and time/space, the viewer abandoning the position of the subject by ridding themselves of the illness of expecting, commending to return to the call of thought and experience. To be able to approach an art work as a thing in and of itself that is able to step outside of the constructed field and games of representation will enable us to once again construct relationships between the area that it has opened and things themselves. When an art work emerges and establishes itself in the openness that it has created for itself, everything that happens after that art work appear in a different way. Everything that happens is constructed in the field that it has opened up; nothing is as it was, the world is not what it was, even the earth is different. [2]

Translated from Turkish and edited by Merve Ünsal

Endnotes:

[1] ~ Fr écran trench, screen, curtain.

[2] Heidegger’s words on the thingness of the art work could be useful here. Zeynep Direk, Heidegger’in Sanat Anlayışı, https://zeynepdirek.wordpress.com/2012/12/15/heideggerin-sanat-anlayisi-2/.

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Naci Emre Boran writes about books and films.

To be deported: Approaching The Central Region was originally published in m-est on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Murat Akagündüz’s Vertigo, curated by Aslı Seven, was on view at Arter, Istanbul, between March 30 and May 15, 2016.

Murat Akagündüz’s recent “Vertigo” is not yet another landscape show. In search of a new painterly language delving into the depths of abstraction, the artist’s ‘‘Kaf’’ series (2014–2016) — 13 out of 15 same-sized, white-on-white oil paintings featured here — investigates a fresh understanding of nature and the relationship between earth and universe, along with the very act of seeing. As Akagündüz moves away from the Anatolian geographies that have previously dominated his similarly large-scale, resin on canvas works, he embarks on a new image-making process based on Google Maps snapshots of the Alps and the Himalayas in this new series, to which the artist dedicated the past three years. The outcome of an ongoing dialogue between curator Aslı Seven and Akagündüz, this exhibition raises critical questions not just around the genre, traditions, and contemporary relevance of painting; it touches on the intentional dialogue between works and modes of display along with utilizing monochromatism and digital mediation as visual strategies with which to investigate a sense of precarity and state of doubt that seems to permeate contemporary culture.

[caption id=”attachment_2947" align=”aligncenter” width=”640"]

Murat Akagündüz, Vertigo, exhibition view at Arter, Istanbul, 2016. Photo by Ali Taptık.[/caption]

Upon entering Arter’s rectangular second-floor gallery — which at first might seem like a challenging space to work with for a painting show of this scale — one slightly feels uncomfortable not knowing what it is that s/he is looking at. This uncanny feeling evoked by the paintings is combined with an immediate disorientation or loss of balance, already foreshadowed in the exhibition title. One obvious reason is the white-on-white aesthetics of the works themselves, demonstrating the artist’s inquiry into materiality and eventually creating an optical illusion. Despite having its roots in the modernist idea of “impression”[1], the series draws from Romantic and Postmodernist painterly sensibilities alike. It depicts no lucid form but performs very subtle interpretations of light and shadow through minimal gestures of lines and stains as well as the use of different tonalities of white, echoing Baudelaire’s musing on there being no such thing as color but infinitely diverse tones.[2]

Another reason behind this discomfort could be traced to the meticulously used curatorial tactics including the exhibition design — the way the paintings are installed, purposeful architectural interventions made within the space after a full layering on the existing gallery walls and the flood lighting wrapping the works with a uniform intensity throughout. Frequent visitors to Arter would confirm that each show surprises the viewers with bold changes to the exhibition space. What “Vertigo” does, however, is hidden in the subtle axial changes on some of the walls that have no works hung on them. Moreover, the installation of the paintings is not uniform in their leveling nor grouping, contrary to many permanent museum displays of historical landscapes. While some works are hung in groups, others stand alone at varied heights making it even more difficult to trace a horizon line in these paintings.[3] For example, the five-work-block on the left-hand-side, with each work almost touching the other, hints at what the layout originally imagined by the artist-curator duo would look like had this been a different space.[4] In another instance, one work — the one that looks most like a landscape painting according to the curator — is installed solo and lower in a niche built in on the main wall towards the right.

[caption id=”attachment_2948" align=”aligncenter” width=”600"]

Murat Akagündüz, Vertigo, exhibition view at Arter, Istanbul, 2016. Photo by Ali Taptık.[/caption]

Careful orchestration of works throughout the space marks slight distinctions and visual ruptures, both horizontally and vertically, for the standing viewer. However, wandering through the gallery and looking at several works simultaneously from a distance, one recognizes that this unique rhythm actually feeds into the intended vertigo experience for the viewer. It is also worth mentioning the role of flood lights, contrary to dramatic lights that have traditionally come to objectify the artwork and situate it within a hierarchical mode of display. The lights used here create a rather homogeneous environment that mimics the visual effects of the paintings and serves to draw parallels between this unstable spatial experience and the socio-political conditions that surround us today.

Going back to the works themselves, we notice Akagündüz’s continued interest in mountainous landscapes. In this case, however, it is far from natural or historical sites in Anatolia that the artist is familiar with, such as in “Homeland-Anatolia” series (2010–2012) and “Turabdin” (2010–11) paintings. Mythical Qaf mountains that are said to surround the world and hinder humankind from crossing them — according to many folk tales — , lend their name to the series, which not only revisits landscape painting, a long tradition particularly in Western painting, but also complicates the artist’s process. Previously, Akagündüz took photographs as he travelled to places, mostly in Turkey, his country of origin, and used them as reference for his paintings, exhibited in his 2012 solo exhibition Hell Heaven at Galeri Mana, for example. However, in the new series, instead of going to the Alps or Himalayas physically and taking pictures there, Akagündüz bases his new paintings on cartographic visual material captured by Google Maps from up above. The horizon is nowhere to be found due to the vertical perspective dictated by the digital interface of Google Maps, perhaps distinguishing this particular exhibition from that of other contemporary landscape paintings. Despite the fact that art work titles correspond to particular coordinates, specifying the exact geographical locations framed in the canvases, the language of the paintings does the opposite. They don’t reveal any visual or other clues as to “where” we see in each work. This is exactly Akagündüz’s point.

[caption id=”attachment_2949" align=”aligncenter” width=”600"]

Murat Akagündüz, Vertigo, exhibition view at Arter, Istanbul, 2016. Photo by Ali Taptık.[/caption]

In “Vertigo”, Murat Akagündüz demonstrates a unique post-photographic process, exploring something beyond territorial, spatial certainties and rendering precise topographic details to earth’s surface. In other words, he is not interested in “representation of representation”[5] or exploring the “sublime” in nature, such as in 17th century western painting. Instead, his objective is to create a new space, a rather abstract one, for us to contemplate on. In other words, the artist demands us to imagine crossing the mythical Qaf mountains. For this, it is necessary that we are skeptical towards what we see in this show and imagine what might lay beyond our fragile and unstable spatial or social frameworks and how we can potentially go beyond them.

[caption id=”attachment_2950" align=”aligncenter” width=”600"]

Murat Akagündüz, Vertigo, exhibition view at Arter, Istanbul, 2016. Photo by Ali Taptık.[/caption]

Edited by Merve Ünsal

Endnotes:

[1] Murat Akagündüz & Aslı Seven, ‘Vertigo’, video documentation. Available here: http://www.arter.org.tr/W3/?iExhibitionId=62

[2] ibid.

[3] Aslı Seven, “Vertigo: Lifting the Horizon” in Vertigo (exh. cat.) ed. Süreyya Evren (Istanbul: Arter, 2016), pp. 16–21.

[4] Conversation and curatorial tour with Aslı Seven, March 23, 2016, Arter, Istanbul.

[5] Aras Özgün, “Extracting Landscape from Mapping” in Vertigo (exh. cat.) ed. Süreyya Evren (Istanbul: Arter, 2016), pp. 80–84.

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İpek Ulusoy Akgül (b. 1985, Istanbul, Turkey) is an independent curator, writer, and editor currently based in Dubai. She recently acted as the Managing Editor of ArteEast Quarterly, an online publication on contemporary artistic practices from MENA and beyond (2014–16). İpek is currently working on a group exhibition that offers critical spatial narratives opening in Istanbul in Fall 2016. İpek has an MA in Museum Studies from New York University.

On Murat Akagündüz’s Vertigo at Arter, Istanbul was originally published in m-est on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When I was a college student in 2006, I signed up for a class taught by Peter Kubelka, the filmmaker. The name of the class was “Film, Food, and Other Arts.” The syllabus was announced before the first session; the list included Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, Konrad Lorenz’s On Aggression, Moliere’s Candide, the Bible, among others — seemingly unrelated texts and an impossible workload for just one class. Many students dropped the course, intimidated by the amount of reading. When asked about the syllabus, Kubelka was confused: he thought the syllabus functioned as a recommendation list of things he wished we read, not things we must read. This was a simple albeit crucial moment for my education as an artist — the shoulds contribute a lot more to an artist’s development than the musts. I kept remembering this anecdote during my year as a participant at Homework Space Program (HWP) in Beirut. How do you become a “better” artist? Or more on point, how do you teach a group of artists to become “better” artists? What should they do? I wrote the below text to elaborate on some of the questions through the very vocabulary we use in talking about art education.

I’m an artist based in Istanbul. I applied to and was selected for the Homework Space Program 2014–2015. I already had an MFA, so for me, this program primarily meant nine months away from my home base, participating in the structure of an educational program where I could meet like-minded peers working in the Middle East and North Africa region. The nine-month program is a complement to degree-granting graduate or postgraduate programs, focusing on MENAT (Middle East, North Africa and Turkey). On the website of the program, applicants from the region are encouraged to apply: “The HWP is open to international applicants; applicants from Lebanon and the Arab region are especially encouraged to apply.” Of the sixteen participants who completed the program (eighteen were admitted, sixteen finished the year), the countries of origin are: Egypt, Germany, Jordan, Lebanon, Canada/Pakistan, Palestine, Turkey, Ukraine/Russia, Lebanon/UAE/USA, and Yemen.

[caption id=”attachment_2936" align=”aligncenter” width=”588"]

Peter Kubelka, “Concert and Dinner for Animals and Humans” Staedelschule, February 8, 1983.[/caption]

Fellow/Student/Participant

The term “participant” has been a point of contention among those in the program as well as the people outside it who try to understand what the program is. Alternatives that were used have been “student” and “fellow,” both of which come with their own associations. The institution uses the word “participant” in texts about the program while different members of the administration went back and forth between “student,” “fellow,” and “participants.” By those pursuing the program, the most common terms used were “student” and “participant,” not “fellow.”

“Student” is associated often with a pre-professional state. Rightfully coined or not, “student artist” is not a connotation that one desires. Also, it is hard to let go of the idea that being a “student” implies some sort of responsibility to the institution and a vertical hierarchy, of assignments, completion of tasks, and perhaps the illusion of a degree. We are unfortunately all too familiar with what a “student exhibition” implies — an incompleteness, a work-in-progress, different set of expectations than what would be applied to an “exhibition.”

“Fellow” carries the connotation of being a member of a group of people with a similar goal, a society of the likeminded if you will. This term does not work well in this instance, because the group of people are not there based on their research interests but are selected to be a part of the program. In other words, the thing that they share is wanting to participate in the program and not necessarily what they want to do with themselves or what they want to do with their work. Dialogues with other participating artists reveal different sets of expectations in terms of where each person wants to get out of the program, be it contacts, theoretical background, or just a scholarship to get paid to be an artist for nine months.

In other words, the only common denominator of the participants is that they are there because they believed the nine-month program would be useful. However, “participant”s implication in partaking in the process of the program is problematic, because the experience felt top-down and opaque in terms of decision-making processes. After having completed the program, I find using the term “student” more appropriate and I believe that if we had used this term consistently — both the administration and as artists in the program — , this would have altered the experience as the expectations, behaviors, and processes associated with being a student are pre-defined by the schooling that everybody had received. Definitions and terms used in contexts where relationships between institutions and artists are established are important; the slippery terminology in this case did not help with the already volatile nature of a post-degree arts education program.

Education

The year-long program was thematically organized. The umbrella theme of the year was Setups / Situations / Institutions. The core educational model of the program was bringing in six practitioners, the “resident professors” to lead the workshops. [1] The premise was show and tell: artists and curators talk about their research and their issues of concern by inviting people to share their thoughts and ideas. By involving “emerging”[2] artists in their processes, the resident professors shared their work by delivering artist lectures and their colleagues’ works, exposing networks of knowledge, friendship, and common research questions. It was possible to see through private workshops as well as public lectures how each resident professor addressed a concept in their research through interdisciplinary dialogues with other artistic and cultural practitioners. For example, while curators Eungie Joo and Maria Lind (as part of artist Walid Raad’s workshop) shed light on their curatorial practices through speaking about their research as they relate to institutions, artists, and opportunities, artists Josh MacPhee and Rick Lowe (as part of artist Greg Sholette’s workshop) separately discussed their practice within the social fabric of the communities that they belong to or hope to create through their work.

The notion that you can only learn through knowing what somebody else did is a legitimate and effective model of educating. This is where the model of education at Homework Space Program is on point. After all, a “further” education program is where artists can come to just think about the notion of “praxis” as it stands today. Not how you make work, but rather the question of how you build a practice. As contemporary art moves between media and methodologies, being an artist is becoming more and more about a way of ideation that informs the making. The doing is increasingly indistinguishable from the thinking and this is precisely why an artist has to have a firmer grasp on the coordinates — conceptual, formal — of the range on which their praxis moves.

[caption id=”attachment_2941" align=”aligncenter” width=”640"]

Film still from “The Seventh Continent” by Michael Haneke (1989).[/caption]

Structure/Funding

For my year, the admissions committee, which consisted of the resident professors who would teach and the program director, selected eighteen participants. Approximately half the participants received scholarships from the institution while a few received their funding from institutional and/or private sources, secured through letters of support from Ashkal Alwan. Six participants were self-funded. My main question around the structure of this model is whether education and engagement can be level in a context where the financial conditions provided by the institution are not equal for each participant. In other words, how does whether or not one is getting paid by the institution affect their critical relationship with the program?

Before thinking about critical engagement, I’ll take a step back and look at how schools fund their students. While certain schools make their need-based criteria clear in the application process, some schools offer merit-based scholarships. The HWP’s criteria for financial support was never made clear on their website nor during the application process, which they have now amended per their open call for 2016–2017 — every participant admitted to the program will be funded. (For the sake of transparency, I was among the students who did not receive funding.) A side effect of not receiving funding is that if you have to work elsewhere to be present in the program, your questioning of the utilitarian value of the program for your practice becomes more pressing.

A question that became a heated discussion topic among the participants is the issue of criticality and feedback. It is relatively easier to give the institution a hard time when you are self-funded. You can push the institution to change and to take in feedback because your livelihood does not depend on them — the dynamic could be compared to that between an employer and employee vs. between colleagues. How can there be a transparent feedback mechanism that treats each and every participant in the same manner and that has a horizontal power structure if we are to talk about creating new educational frameworks? Maybe this means that the funding from the program is guaranteed no matter what happens throughout the course of the year. Maybe this means the financial decisions and conditions are pre-determined and confirmed in writing. As with anything else that relates to money and self-sustenance, this is a tricky subject to tackle that I’m disappointed to say was not addressed directly, together, by the participants and the institution in my year.

[caption id=”attachment_2940" align=”aligncenter” width=”640"]

Ashkal Alwan, Beirut.[/caption]

Space

What makes for a useful educational space for artists? Could education be enforced spatially? Ashkal Alwan is located on the second floor of a three-floor, formerly industrial building in Beirut’s Jisr el Wati neighborhood. The space’s architectural design (overseen by a board of advisors selected by Ashkal Alwan) somewhat mimics concerns with the “public space” — a nod to the roots of the institution in the 90s, reclaiming the public space of post-civil war Beirut by installing art works in public spaces — through various elements. The floor tiles are reminiscent of cobblestones, extending the outdoor space inside and vice versa. The offices have glass walls, contributing to the feeling of an open plan. While the openness of the space reinforces the notion of education as a shared and collective experience, working, thinking, and doing in the same space, the scale and the industrial vibe is not functional as a shared work space.

The open and “public” space notions are important conceptually, but the functionality of a space is and should remain a discussion topic that changes with the works of the participants each year. The space is functional for artistic practice stripped bare, which the institution embraces as an approach. The unspoken motto seems to be, “You make what you need to make, but first relate to each other.”

What do we have to learn from collectivity, from being together as artists in a space? (There are a few private spaces in Ashkal Alwan — everyone working there, including the staff, is basically in one big space. Sharing a space does not imply collectivity, but there is something about co-existing in the same space that at least begs the question of what brings people together.) Could knowledge be produced together in a group of artists curated by an institution? Although problematic, the use of the word “curate” is essential here since the instincts used to place the participants next to each other appear to have been more aimed at how they appear together and what that statement is. The selected participants appear to present an art public that the institution deems important to promote and I would have liked to hear more about the curatorial framework of selecting participants and what was hoped for in placing them in one space. Just like works placed next to each other in an exhibition relate both to each other and to the curatorial text, I think the HWP — the participants and the administration — would benefit from writing and thinking about the ideas that the artists in the program present.

As research becomes central to many people’s artistic practice and as processes become more convoluted, could artists be encouraged to work together? How can the institution encourage and nourish collectivity? Could they form an international artist’s union? [3] What exactly distinguishes this experience of being educated at Ashkal Alwan?

Artistic practice

How does an education program place practice at its center? What is a realistic time requirement? What are the activities that contribute to artistic practice? Perhaps ambiguity is exactly the field of interactions that an artist in the making seems to need — questioning, pushing up against, retaliating, recoiling, making, and unmaking. Having had a few months of contemplation after the ebbs and flows of the program, I still question what I need as an artist from interdisciplinary, idea-driven educational program. Maybe this is idyllic, but education should retain its status as a space of contemplation.

Within educational structures, it is important to set feedback mechanisms and expectations from the beginning. While participants make a formal and informal pact with the institution to attend the program, the program and the institution also need to say clearly what they expect from the participants in order for the program to work. This is something that does not necessarily need to exist for an exhibition or a forum — selections are made, works are created, events are held — things need to happen. Education is necessarily process-driven and all the parties involved in this process need to have an equal agency in determining the content and the direction of what happens in the program.

In the case of Homework Space Program, the institution’s desire not to self-define ended up creating a more “rigid” framework than the academy and this is something that can only be changed if we initiate dialogues on what artists need and want prospectively rather than how they can navigate the treacherous waters of what already exists. We need flexibilities, voids, bends, and curves — not rigid structures, if artistic practices are to be nourished for and through what they are. The artists need to talk about what is happening at the program throughout the program and this criticality, dialogue, conversation, whatever you want to call it, needs to somehow be built in. What’s happening? What works? What doesn’t?

Nine months is a relatively long time and I see it as a missed opportunity that the structure did not find it within itself to change within that time. Setting no expectations, no rules, no requirements meant that all of these were implicit and unfixed. Expectations changed, shifted, appeared and disappeared throughout the course of the program, resulting a general sense of underachievement. Even a simple distinction between “recommended” and “required” would help participants manage their time and divide their energies between the program and their own work.

[caption id=”attachment_2939" align=”aligncenter” width=”640"]

Film still from “Decalogue I” by Krzysztof Kieślowski (1989).[/caption]

Could/Should/Must

The most teaching experience of the whole year started in March, when the participants started to plan for a “workshop” that they would determine the content for. The participants would be the final “resident professors” of the program, holding their own workshops, creating content to fit their own research questions, just like the previous resident professors did. All the participants were aware that they would be asked to organize this workshop from the moment they were accepted to the program and it was something that everybody was thinking about throughout the course of the year. Voting procedures were set, subcommittees formed, agendas discussed extensively.

At the end, the process unravelled at a meeting with the administration of the institution when it became evident that the participants not only could not agree to move in the direction of that the majority had determined, but also that the institution’s expectations of what would constitute a workshop was not aligned with where things were heading. The collective workshop not happening [4] taught a valuable lesson to all parties involved: it takes more than sitting in the same room to make something happen. After all, while self-determination is something that is desired, its actual implementation within institutional frameworks is thorny. Where do you draw the line between the institution and what happens within the institution? Is it even possible to imagine a blurring of these boundaries?

This experiment in self-determination was also a teaching experience because it became obvious that the artists in the program were not aligned in terms of what they wanted to do with a workshop, making it very clear that six months into the program, nobody was really sure what a workshop was or what our collective research could be. This failure made obvious that the participants did not share a common concern and they had not produced a safe discursive space where different concerns and ideas could be discussed.

The question of what kind of an educational framework creates the most fertile ground to develop different artistic practices is one that remains pertinent after having completed HWP. The most momentous element is the time aspect. In our age of precarity where public support is extremely limited and the commercial art world functions as an independent beast with its own criteria of merit and success, what is a realistic time requirement to expect from an emerging artist? How much time does it actually take to develop a practice? What are the activities that contribute to artistic practice?

And this is where I find Kubelka’s teaching philosophy helpful: education is a space of shoulds and not musts. I like the idea of thinking about what could be, not what is. Education should be a space where we, collectively, with and through the institution, think about what we need and what can happen.

Edited by Özge Ersoy

Endnotes:

[1] Resident professors were: Lina Saneh (preface), Khalil Rabah, Walid Raad, Kader Attia, Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige, Gregory Sholette, and WHW. Running throughout the year was a seminar by Jalal Toufic that takes place every three weeks. In this seminar, participants of the program, along with interested members of the public, discussed Toufic’s writings in an intimate environment. Toufic consulted the participants in deciding what to read/discuss next, contributing to a sense of continuation and of shared vocabulary. Participants could also request studio visits with Toufic, who had an office at Ashkal Alwan, a constant in the peripatetic nature of the whole program.

[2] As another participant, Salwa Aleryani, pointed out to me in conversation, the use of the term “emerging” as it applies to countries is perhaps a good point of comparison. There are countries with long histories who are emerging and who have larger populations, area, and resources than other non-emerging countries, so obviously, the term “emerging” is quite flexible.

[3] Thanks to artist and fellow participant Mary Jirmanus Saba for her unrelenting insistence on this word.

[4] A few participants led individual events in the time slot designated for the collective workshop.

A glossary for arts education: On the Home Workspace Program 2014–2015 was originally published in m-est on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Nancy Atakan’s monograph Passing On, edited by Nat Muller, has been recently published by Kehrer Publishers, Germany. The book looks at Atakan’s production inspired by the past, memories, social transitions, and female role models. Below is a conversation with Nancy Atakan on her book Passing On, effects of female role models on her life and art, and the shape her work has taken throughout the years. — T.E.

[caption id=”attachment_2927" align=”aligncenter” width=”640"]

Nancy Atakan, Passing On II, 2015. Double channel video, 4 min 12 sec.[/caption]

Tuğba: “Passing on” had already been one of the main concepts you adopted in your practice. When we look at the series included in the book, do we see continuity with your earlier production and thoughts?

Nancy: I have a large body of work because I work continuously. Some have never been exhibited. I deal with what I am living at a specific time. But, I can say that as a concept, “passing on” can be traced through my earliest to my most recent art practice. As women and as artists we continually pass on stories, ideas, as well as objects to the next generation. Whether we are aware or not aware; whether good or bad, we are always handing something down.

I like story-telling and women have always been the storytellers of family history. Some women who influenced my life passed something on to me. Perhaps I too am passing something on to others.

As professional women we need female role models. Painting has always been a technique used by male artists. While painting, I searched for female painters and at one time looked at Helen Frankenthaler’s technique and studied Leyla Gamsız’s use of colour. As I researched for my doctorate thesis, I realized that conceptual art was also male dominated. In the 1960s and 1970s women artists working in western cities who stressed concept over perception and idea over morphology were not classified as conceptual artists. Like male conceptual artists, many female artists rejected modernism, but they argued not only against its aesthetical base, but also against its gender politics. Like them I saw that painting and sculpture could not be separated from a masculine rhetoric. I shared their use of collaboration as a major strategy and used female crafts such as needlework and lace. I also wanted to reclaim lived experiences and everyday gestures, my own body, and how it was to be represented.

[caption id=”attachment_2928" align=”aligncenter” width=”600"]

Nancy Atakan, My Name is Azade, 2014. Pencil drawings with hand written text, 40 x 30 cm.[/caption]

Tuğba: Could we speak about the feministic approach in your work? Where does the My Name is Azade (Freedom) series stand within this practice?

Nancy: Inspired by Luce Irigaray’s writings, I made an artwork in 2003 that was exhibited at Pi Artworks. Her writings reinforced my belief that we need strong female role models and I made the big pink neon sign, Why not two gods? I am asking, who are our important female role models? Where are our pink goddesses? How can we function in society, how can we build our lives without them? I am a woman and I deal with experiences that affect my way of existing in the world as a woman. Male painters depicted women, painted their bodies. I decided to use my own body and voice in my work.

I did not look to women in my native country, but to women from my everyday life. One was my mother-in-law. She was a strong, educated, intelligent woman who was both kind and gentle but also determined and wise. Born during the Ottoman period, she became a chemical engineer in the Republic. I did a work titled Lost Suitcase, that re-told the stories that she told me. It was based on reality, but was really fiction. I chose to use a melodramatic romantic style often found in old Turkish films. It shows her determination to get an education and to marry a man of her choice from another clan, two people from two different minority groups.

One of my earlier videos Grandmother’s Lace researched the history of lace making among my mother in law’s elderly female relatives; designs of highly skilled masterpieces that ended up stored in trunks. The work was also about the suppression of identity and religion. It also included a male voice singing a secret Sebatay Levi prayer.

My recent addition to this series, My Name is Azade (Freedom), is about another woman who influenced me. The main character, Azade, was also born in the Ottoman period, but became a professional gymnastics teacher in the Republic. I took lessons from her from 1975 to 1980 when she was in her 70s and I not yet 30. Because of her, I continued all my life to exercise. She never became world famous, but she developed a unique system of teaching and a body of work that was very important. In the 1970s, she was incorporating yoga and pilates into her practice. When she left Turkey, she gave me a home movie of her performing her movements. I kept that video all these years and used it for my Passing On II video. From her video, I selected four movements and taught them to my daughter-in-laws, my granddaughters, my pilates teachers, and two other of her former students. My video project shot from above in a sense illustrates the process of passing on. We look for inspiration, make an effort to internalize this and find our own way of being, then we teach and pass on to others what we develop.

[caption id=”attachment_2929" align=”aligncenter” width=”424"]

Nancy Atakan, My Name is Azade, 2014. Pencil drawings with hand written text, 40 x 30 cm.[/caption]

Tuğba: You often transform personal memories and objects from the past and family stories to use in your artworks. How do these intimate elements turn into the narratives that you share with other people and that anyone can relate to?

Nancy: That’s the whole purpose of turning something into artwork. You start from the personal, but transform it into something meaningful to others. For example, let’s look at my work People Objects (2003). Who gives objects value? Someone gives us a present. Every time we see that object we remember the giver. In this project, I photographed objects, digitally added the name of the person they remind me of and printed them on small pieces of Plexiglas. After the show, I gave the Plexiglas pieces to the original givers.

What is an artwork? An artwork seems to me to be a type of document, the documentation of a process, something that was thought or experienced. I wrote a short tautological text, “I am documenting the document. Someone is documenting my document. The documentation is being documented. My document, documentation, is our document. The document has been documented.” I recited this in front of a camera for a Sanatın Tanımı Topluluğu- STT (The Definition of Art Group) film in 1994 and then remade it for myself in 2012. An artwork is a document of an artist’s thought process while trying to understand. The artwork is the byproduct.

[caption id=”attachment_2930" align=”aligncenter” width=”415"]

Nancy Atakan, 1980, 2012. Silkscreen print, handwritten text on silk, 1125 x 50 cm.[/caption]

Tuğba: In works such as 1980 dated 2012, you refer to stories and realities of the past. Is there any significance of producing that work in this particular time? Why not earlier or later but that day?

Nancy: Some of my work includes memories but it also relates to current events — such as the work I made with scarves. I would not have thought of doing an artwork with scarves if they were not such an important contemporary symbol. I went through my husband’s family portraits from 1930s until 1980 to find photographs of female family members wearing some type of head covering that had no political or religious connotation. I remembered before 1980s when I uninhibitedly wore a scarf. I did work with scarves based on a memory before scarves became a political and a religious symbol. I did a research about scarves. How do you design a scarf? For example, they have a border but what should the border be? I took a trip to İznik to look at İznik tiles to see if there were any motifs that I could use. I transferred the photographs of women wearing scarves into black and white drawings for five silkscreen scarves. I also started reading articles about the history of the headscarf in Turkey. The sixth scarf is a very long scarf with a handwritten text based on this research. This scarf has several meters of empty white space because the story is continuing. This series would be an example of both using my personal history and also looking at current events.

[caption id=”attachment_2931" align=”aligncenter” width=”640"]

Nancy Atakan, Lost Suitcase, 2011. Single channel video, 3 min 36 sec.[/caption]

“For me, the medium was no longer important; only the idea”

Tuğba: How did your artistic practice become interdisciplinary? Today we see more and more interdisciplinary practices in the art world, but 20 years ago this was new.

Nancy: Initially, I was a very traditional painter educated as an Abstract Expressionist in the United States. Until 1990, I made watercolors, acrylic paintings, collages, and expressionistic work and had had three solo exhibitions. For the entrance of the new Mövenpick Hotel in Istanbul, Sıdıka Atalay bought a series of collage pieces on wood. Unlike most artists who would immediately become very excited and happy about such a situation, I started questioning. What does it mean for my work to be bought by a hotel and to be in a hotel? Is being sold what gives artwork value?

Simultaneously a Fulbright scholar, Nan Freeman started teaching a class in 20th Century Art History at Boğaziçi University and I took her class. She really influenced me. I had been in Turkey for 20 years; we didn’t have Internet, new art books, or magazines. In her class, I realized how much I didn’t know or understand. For example, I did not understand conceptual art. I was about 40 years old when this wonderful and dynamic teacher exposed new ideas to me. Freeman saw my eagerness and when she left, she gave me all the books she brought with her. I read everything and realized, I really did not want to make paintings any more.

I started researching conceptual art, but it wasn’t easy because it wasn’t popular anywhere in the world and there was not a lot written about it. My sons were in university in the USA and I used their university’s libraries. I also visited the Castelli Gallery in New York that represented Joseph Kosuth.

After speaking with Prof. Zeynep İnankur at Mimar Sinan University, I decided to do a PhD on how conceptual art came to Turkey. While continuing to teach full-time at Robert College, I began classes at the university. For four years I read, wrote, and attended Şükrü Aysan’s STT (The Definition of Art Group) meetings. As a part of my research I also interviewed such artists as Füsun Onur, Ayşe Erkmen, Canan Beykal, Gülsün Karamustafa, Serhat Kiraz, Ahmet Öktem. After finishing my thesis in 1995, my art practice became interdisciplinary. I called my way of working “art as dialogue.”

[caption id=”attachment_2932" align=”aligncenter” width=”640"]

Nancy Atakan, Lost Suitcase, 2011. Single channel video, 3 min 36 sec.[/caption]

Tuğba: During this great shift in your art practice, is it only the medium that changed or was it also concepts, ideas, themes?

Nancy: After finishing my research, I rejected painting as a method and realized I could use whatever I needed to materialize my ideas. I am not a photographer, but I started using photographs; I had not been trained in video technology, but I started making video works; when digital technology arrived I moved from using photocopies to making digital prints. For me, the medium was no longer important — only the idea. So that was a big shift.

Tuğba: In the 1990s, conceptual art was something very fresh in Turkey. The mid and late 1990s, was a very special period and conceptual art was on the rise. Do you think this change in your work was also related to the dynamics of that time?

Nancy: It was something I believed in. It was just the way I thought it should be. In the 1990s lots of people were thinking this way. I was working with a group of women artists, Gül Ilgaz, Neriman Polat, and Gülçin Aksoy. We shared a studio and strove to legitimize our way of working which was more language and idea based. We organized our own exhibitions and were always present to explain what we were doing. By 2000, we saw that we had succeeded in legitimizing our methods and invited other artists, some working with video and installations others were painters or sculptors, to work with us to organize three other exhibitions. Our aim was to destroy the polarization between painters and sculptors on one side and people using photography and video or installation on the other…

In the 90s many exhibitions used complicated philosophical titles that nobody understood. We wanted to emphasize more local topics and to have exhibitions that were dealing with what we were experiencing at that time. We organized three exhibitions, Yerli Malı (Local Produce), Yurttan Sesler (Voices from our Homeland) and Aileye Mahsus (For Families Only) dealing with local concepts. Our previous exhibitions had been about “being in between” because we were not painters or sculptors and our way of working hadn’t been totally legitimized.

In my opinion, a “significant” current trend in the contemporary art scene is the “art of social practice” or what I named “art as dialogue” in 1995 — work that involves social interaction and focuses on current problems. I see collaboration as a very important way to work. I had always wanted to open a non-profit informal art space that supported projects dealing only with relationships, sharing and ideas. In 2007, when Hou Hanru chose the 1960s Istanbul Trader’s Market Shopping Center (İMÇ) as a venue for the Istanbul Biennial, I invited Adnan Yıldız to use shops I owned for a peripheral project. Volkan Aslan and I had been wanting to open an artist’s initiative and after the positive experience in this space during the biennial, with the help of Marcus Graf as our first curator we opened 5533.

[caption id=”attachment_2734" align=”aligncenter” width=”640"]

Any Questions?, 2014, A 5533 Project by Nancy Atakan and Volkan Aslan.[/caption]

Tuğba: How has your practice evolved after founding 5533?

Nancy: This is a very interesting question, but one that I have not thought about until now. Of course, we designed, participated in and contributed to different projects at 5533, but Volkan (Aslan) and I did not open this initiative to promote our own artwork and never thought of showing our work in this space. Nevertheless, I have always felt that 5533 completed and continued my practice because I see art as a space to create models for living, to try to understand the world we live in, to question, to discuss and to experiment. Since 5533 is about experience, discussion, meeting others interested in art and sharing ideas, it has undoubtedly enriched my practice even if I cannot tell you how, even if I cannot quantify or qualify. I can only say that I feel very lucky to have had the chance to work with the different local and international artists, curators, students, spectators and neighbors who have contributed to making 5533 what it is today.

Edited by Merve Ünsal

///

Working as an artist, teacher, art historian, and art critic, American born Turkish artist Nancy Atakan has been a resident of Istanbul since 1969. Her artwork has been represented by Pi Artworks since 2009 where she has had four solo shows in Istanbul. With Volkan Aslan, she co-founded 5533 Artist Initiative in 2008. In 1998 her book, Alternatives to Painting and Sculpture was published and a revised second edition came out in 2009. Atakan earned her PhD in art history from Mimar Sinan University, Istanbul, in 1995. She has taught in the Art Departments of Robert College and Boğazici University, Istanbul. Some selected exhibitions include: Sporting Chances (solo), Pi Artworks London, UK (2016); Small Faces, Big Bodies, Elgiz Museum of Contemporary Art, Istanbul, Turkey, (2015); ​Keeping on Keeping on, Treibsand Art Space on DVD, Zurich, Switzerland (2012); Dream and Reality- Modern and Contemporary Women Artists from Turkey, Istanbul Modern, Turkey (2011). Under My Feet I Want the World, Istanbul Next Wave, Akademie Der Kunste, Berlin, Germany (2009).

Tuğba Esen is the editor of culture and arts at Agos Newspaper. She is at the same time managing the press and public relations for the gallery Pi Artworks Istanbul/ London. Since 2013 she has been working in freelance projects. Nowadays she is writing her first book, biography of an actor, which is to be published by Aras Publishing in late 2016.

Art as dialogue: A conversation on Nancy Atakan’s practice was originally published in m-est on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Cengiz Çekil, Diary, 1976.[/caption]

Özge Karagöz

At the beginning, I wasn’t planning to write the below text, the point of departure of which is the artist Cengiz Çekil’s 1976 work Diary; a recent re-encounter with it seemed to demand its timely reconsideration. This re-encounter was triggered by an unfortunate event — on November 10, 2015, the artist passed away. In the art worlds, the death of an artist paradoxically means increased visibility. In the aftermath of hearing the saddening news of Çekil’s death, I read a few commemorative texts written on the artist and his oeuvre. [1]

One text was primarily about his Diary, and it included the above photographic documentation of it, rendering this re-encounter possible. In the following days, Çekil’s Diary gained another meaning for me, a more singular and affective one, as I couldn’t help but feel intensely with the work. Considering the difference between my earlier impulse to make a brief art historical reading of Diary in a comparison with the Japanese artist On Kawara’s Today series, I also realized that the way I, as well as others, make sense of this work was in itself worthy of reflection. What you are about to read here is a meditation on Çekil’s Diary that is followed by a reflection on its course of reception — both by “local” and “international” audiences — and perhaps also another text of commemoration. A commemoration that perceives this particular work of art produced in 1976 as an event that is not only able to persist into the present but also to instigate future critical inquiry about how art historical meaning-making functions between different geographies.

On view, there is an open notebook, the pages of which are colored with a pink and yellow hue. Looking at its open pages, the text stamped in blue ink comes to the fore. It reads Bugün de yaşıyorum [I am still alive today]. Ornamenting the upper left sides of the two open pages, the small flower figures colored in bright red and green grab your attention next. You then finally notice the six digit number stamped on the upper right side of the page on the right. Sequenced one after another, without any break, the combination of the digits feels arbitrary at first. Ordered yet still arbitrary in relation to what they signify, the arbitrariness of the digits brings to mind those of meticulously ordered state bureaucracies. What implies this feeling of the bureaucratic is the sort of dated, yet timeless, serif font with which the text is stamped. If you follow a logical meaning-making impulse, invited by the date reference in the sentence (I am still alive today), you may realize that that arbitrary looking number indeed suggests a particular date, 13 May 1976. The bureaucratic feeling, here, then reminds you with the one that is accompanied by a sense of powerlessness that many felt during the socially and politically turbulent times of the 1970s in Turkey.

Within this triangulation in the composition — the text, the flower figures, and finally the numbers — the painfully bureaucratic feeling that the stamped date conveys contrasts heavily with the bright flower figures. The flower figures have a quality of the folkloric in their unrealistically detailed and sharp rendering coupled with bright hues. This folkloric quality is also accentuated by the warm, pink-yellow hue of the pages. Such a balance of visual affects, of the coldness of the “bureaucratic” and the warmth of the “folkloric,” generates a palpable feeling, and, in doing so, brings the artist alive into our presence, as if he is still a feeling body, in flesh. In doing so, the work connects the viewer with the artist and his enormous affective capacity — one that was so enormous that it became inevitable for him not to pass over the desolation that permeated the everyday. The work conveys the feeling that the artist was tormented by a sense of hopelessness triggered by the logically impenetrable state operations, and that, at the same time, he saw a warm optimism in the folkloric. Through this work, the artist thus appears to be full of vigor because it is he who appropriated both the “folkloric” and the “bureaucratic” that almost always exclude the experience of individuals, who made a timeless effort to express his torment and to connect with those feeling similar kinds of despair, who was powerful enough to claim the particularity of his experience by resisting the strong bureaucratic currents. Those currents that systematically categorize you out every day, that take your individuality away, and that turn you into a mere number. Did I mention that the title of this work of art is Diary?

Upon an initial glance at Çekil’s Diary and before letting yourself be open to feel with the work, however, it is difficult to resist to a different meaning-making approach that is dominated by an impulse to compare it to On Kawara’s Today series (1966–2013). The striking conceptual connection between the two works was indeed one of the first things that came to my mind in encountering Diary. In his Today series, Kawara rendered the dates that he began painting on a monochrome surface since 1966; the times he couldn’t finish a painting the same day, he destroyed it. Within this daily routine that Kawara set for himself, each painting became a record of his survival. A record, however, that he painstakingly needed to create every single day, perhaps because he knew that the opposite of such a record would be that of his death. Yet the fact that Kawara decided to paint the date every day, even though at times he couldn’t finish or find time to do so, expresses certain optimism — one that might have helped him to overcome, although for only as long as a day, the fear of death, and thus to act, to paint, to be.

In both Diary and the Today series, death and hope are the unspoken yet immanently present themes underpinning the works. What the two artists also share is their outstanding mastery over the use of their modest mediums — modest both in terms of their means of production and size — loading them with an enormous amount of affective and conceptual meaning. While Kawara painted on small-scale canvases, the measurements of which varied between eight by ten inches and sixty-one by eighty-nine inches; Çekil applied seal print in an ordinary, mass-produced notebook, measured eight and half by almost six inches.

My own impulse to compare Çekil’s Diary to Kawara’s Today series is only one example; up until the present day, others also picked up the conceptual similarity between their works. One such instance was in the monograph that the critic Necmi Sönmez wrote on Çekil’s oeuvre in 2008 [2], while another was in the curation of a 2011 exhibition in the Museum of Modern Art in New York [3], which also served as an occasion for a comparative reading in an excellent short analysis, again on this website, by Merve Ünsal, the editor of and a regular contributor to m-est.org [4]. In Çekil’s monograph, for instance, Sönmez drew attention to the similarities between Diary and Kawara’s I Got Up… series (1968–1979), in which Kawara sent a series of telegrams that read “I am still alive.” That viewers both from older generations, such as Sönmez (b. 1968) and younger generations from Turkey, such as myself (b. 1990) and Ünsal (b. 1985), inevitably make a reference, when looking at a work of an artist from Turkey, to a work of another artist, who has been included into the Western European and North American art historical canon, I think, deserves a closer look.

In the remainder of the text, I will reflect upon this impulse to compare Çekil’s Diary to Kawara’s works. By doing so, my aim is not to undermine the art historical significance of Çekil’s Diary, but to use the story of its reception as a point of entry to scrutinize the conditions under which artists from “local” contexts can attract canonizing attention of the “international art” worlds. This impulse should, of course, come as no surprise considering the abilities of both artists to give expression to profound feelings through modest means of production. Yet, without disregarding the richness in reading their works together, one should also question the relative absence of other meaningful art historical and literary references between works by artists from Turkey. Why is it that art writers tend to compare works of art produced from Turkey predominantly with the ones that are well canonized from the “international” artistic centers, namely, the ones that are located at North America and Western Europe? In pondering this question here, I will limit my inquiry only to younger generations of art writers from Turkey, therefore exclude a converging yet different line of inquiry governed by the same question in relation to older generations. This is not to say that the latter is less urgent but that it demands a different set of considerations specific to that generation.

Such art historical tendencies to compare works of artists from Turkey to those of others that are canonized by the “international” artistic centers are often left unaddressed. In the case of the younger generations of artists and art writers, the reason for this, I think, is not so much that there is a shortage of works of art or literature from Turkey for comparative readings, but that the younger generations are not educated well enough with Turkey’s own art histories and that narratives for its art histories are lacking. In other words, it appears to be less of a question of individual preference of younger generations than a question pertaining to the present state of the art historical knowledge production and dissemination. In the lack of broader cogent art historical narratives for the visual arts written from Turkey (except a few notable cases, which nevertheless remained limited in their dissemination), we then inevitably orient ourselves towards the existing ones that are able to give meaning to singular works of art. [5] And such narratives are, more often than not, written from the “international” artistic centers. This orientation becomes especially the case when we are first taught the international art historical canon at schools long before we cultivate a curiosity to learn about Turkey’s histories of art. My aim in raising this issue is not to call for a retreat into a provincialist art historical discourse — for we already have plenty of those, especially from the past — and to disregard an enormous critical potential that comparative art historical studies between different geographies hold. Instead, I wish to point out a specific problem that emerges from the fact that the art historical narratives that we, subjects from Turkey or similarly those from other “local” contexts, look at are almost always those of North America and Western Europe. In the light of this one-sided direction of orientation, the question then becomes the uneven relations of the two different contexts of art historical production, between a “local” and an “international” one.

Precisely located at a point where the “local” and the “international” meet, the story of the course of reception of Çekil’s Diary exemplify how an artist from a “local” context can attract canonizing attention of the “international art” worlds. Not surprisingly, a biennial exhibition provides a contact zone for this meeting. “A small notebook in a vitrine at the 2009 Istanbul Biennial caught my attention,” wrote Christian Rattemeyer, an associate curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York [6]. He then went on to say that Diary “marks a watershed moment in Turkish art, a gesture of local political commentary executed with utmost conceptual economy. And its inclusion in the 2009 Istanbul Biennial marked a late discovery of its maker, Cengiz Çekil, by a wider international audience.” As his text mentions elsewhere, the presentation of Diary at the 2009 Istanbul Biennial also led to its acquisition for MoMA’s collection and later to its inclusion in the aforementioned international group exhibition, I am still alive: Politics and Everyday Life in Contemporary Drawing, curated by Rattemeyer himself, at the museum in 2011. In this exhibition, Çekil’s Diary was shown together with Kawara’s Today series as well as with works by other internationally acclaimed artists including León Ferrari, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Lee Lozano, Robert Morris, and Danh Vo. As this brief anecdote reveals, the inclusion of Diary in the 2009 Istanbul Biennial proved to be an event changing the course of the historization, thus reception of Çekil’s work.

Although Çekil was a prolific artist throughout his career beginning in the early 1970s, a wider critical recognition of his work in Turkey can be said to take place only as late as in the late 2000s. His works were exhibited at numerous group exhibitions including Yeni Eğilimler [New Trends in Art] in 1977; Öncü Sanatından Bir Kesit [A Cross Section of Avantgarde Turkish Art] in 1986, 1987, 1988; Toplu Sergi [Joint Exhibit] in 1986, 1987; and the 4th International Istanbul Biennial in 1995. Yet, the first comprehensive presentations of his oeuvre were in 2008 through the aforementioned monographic publication written by Sönmez, and in 2010 with a solo exhibition at Rampa Gallery, a commercial art gallery in Istanbul.

The publication of his monograph in 2008 and the solo exhibition in 2010 were comprehensive in scope, thus were of great importance in doing the groundwork for historization of Çekil’s oeuvre. Yet, they nevertheless remained as singular attempts at historization that are not connected to the broader art historical narratives in Turkey nor to those of Western Europe and North America. The presentation of Diary in the 2009 Istanbul Biennial, on the other hand, resulted in its inclusion in the collection of an internationally influential art museum in North America and in a group exhibition along with internationally prominent artists. Diary’s presentation at the 2009 Istanbul Biennial thus provided a possibility, although indirectly, for its inclusion in broader art historical narratives.

The presentation of Çekil’s Diary together with both Kawara’s Today series as well as “I am alive” in the 2011 group exhibition at MoMA is, as it were, just another iteration of the art historical comparison that was first recorded in Çekil’s monograph written by Sönmez in 2008. Yet, the MoMA’s reiteration appears to be more effective in positioning Çekil within “international” art historical narratives particularly because it has been done so by a leading North American art museum, which has been particularly influential throughout the twentieth century in shaping the central art historical narratives — ones that are able to give meaning to singular works of art by not only connecting them with works of other artists but also by placing them under art movements or other similar broader categorizations. These narratives become even more internationally prominent when such historizations on broader levels are rarely done effectively from the “local” contexts.

That Çekil’s work was able to succeed in such a long and convoluted trajectory to be included in the broader art historical narratives proves both the significance of his practice as well as his patience as an artist. Yet, there are also other important artists from Turkey as well as from other “local” contexts, too, who did not, and most probably will not, succeed in such a trajectory. This is not because their art is of less art historical or critical value, but because how the internationally central art historical structures of evaluation operate for the majority of artists who work from outside of them. Paradoxically, however, these “international” artistic centers are also the ones that are able to produce coherent and cogent art historical narratives, unlike “local” artistic centers. This situation presents a problem unique for the “local” artistic contexts and a related yet different one for the “international” artistic contexts. What needs to and can be done, then, is to carefully reconsider our art historical meaning-making impulses, and, when necessary, to take a step back into self-reflexivity before walking ahead.

Endnotes:

[1] Christian Rattemeyer, “Passages, Cengiz Çekil (1945–2015),” Artforum, January 21, 2016, http://artforum.com/passages/id=56475.

[2] Necmi Sönmez, Cengiz Çekil, A Witness (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Publications, 2008), pg. 40.

[3] I Am Still Alive: Politics and Everyday Life in Contemporary Drawing, curated by Christian Rattemeyer, took place at MoMA on March 23–September 19, 2011 http://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1139?locale=en.

[4] Merve Ünsal, “An Encounter: Cengiz Çekil at MoMA,” m-est.org, April 19, 2011, https://m-est.org/2011/04/10/an-encounter-cengiz-cekil-at-moma/.

[5] For a discussion on master narratives for twentieth-century art and on the way they function, see James Elkins, Master Narratives and Their Discontents (New York: Routledge, 2005).

[6] Christian Rattemeyer, “Passages, Cengiz Çekil (1945–2015),” Artforum, January 21, 2016, http://artforum.com/passages/id=56475.

Edited by Merve Ünsal

Özge Karagöz is a writer and researcher, currently pursuing her MA degree in Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She holds a bachelor’s degree in visual arts from Sabancı University in Istanbul. She is currently working on her MA thesis on Turkey’s artistic discourse in the period 1979–1995. In parallel to her MA thesis, she is also in the process of writing her Non-Thesis, an autobiographical text that reflects upon the relationship of the body to creative and scholarly productions.

Meditations on and through Cengiz Çekil’s Diary was originally published in m-est on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In the aftermath of disasters, time exists in several temporalities — as a decaying façade or as a piece of rusting steel. Not only buildings but also traumatized bodies experience the same thing by being transformed into ruins. After all, bodies, objects, and spaces all carry traumas, which resonate in muscles, cells, and DNAs, as well as in concrete, wood, abandoned houses, and schools.

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mT57fiFQK1s[/embed]

Artist Yishay Garbasz has been coping with trauma and its effects in time as a result of personal discoveries. Yet no violence or sadness can be observed in the first encounter with the artist’s work. The photographer’s first book Becoming (2010) is a flipbook — exhibited as a life-size zoetrope — , documenting her own transformation throughout 28 weeks when she underwent sex change. In a conversation with Sunaura Taylor, Judith Butler mentions a young man who was killed because of his distinct swish: hips moving side to side. [1] The subject generated by power has to perform in a certain way; a basic act such as walking may create danger for the heteronormative society. In Becoming, Garbasz stands passively — however, the transformation of a body raises the problematic of classification of sexes. This passive body raises the question: what does a body aim to say? [2] As Butler points out in the same conversation: “If one doesn’t have recognition for one’s gender presentation or one’s gender identification, then there’s a certain kind of suffering.” As a resistance to normalization, inevitably, Garbasz alludes to various types of traumas generated in the process of subjectification of power.

When I met Garbasz the first time, she was working on her upcoming photo book Ritual and Reality. I was asked to record her words and transcribe them. Garbasz is dyslexic and she learned how to write at a later age, in college. That might be one of the reasons why the artist decided to use photography instead of words and create books with images. For the second book, Garbasz approached another traumatic experience: her own family history to discover missing links of her past, as she knew nothing about her grandparents — she had been rarely exposed to their past or identity. Garbasz’s father, in his deathbed, asked his wife Salla to write about her life story. The narrative in the memoir delineates Salla’s childhood in Germany and the Netherlands during the 1930s and her subsequent imprisonment in Westerbork, Terezin, Auschwitz, Christianstadt, and Bergen-Belsen, which encouraged Garbasz, along with a large format camera, to go embark on a journey. As a sort of therapy to overcome the inherited trauma, Garbasz visited the places Salla mentions in her memoir and looked for energies and traces of her mother. Only two weeks before Salla’s death in Israel, the artist published her book In My Mother’s Footsteps (2009).

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Yishay Garbasz, In My Mother’s Footsteps, 2009. Courtesy of the artist and the Ronald Feldman Fine Art, NY.[/caption]

Turning the pages of Garbasz’s book, I observe an uncanny silence in the images. I read the excerpts of Salla’s memoir accompanying the images and ponder on what is not apparent in the text and the images: What kind of violence had happened? The road Salla walked during the death march, captured in the photo Marinebad 2005, is now part of a calm and sleek, white European city. Abandoned places, such as the underground concentration camp in the photo Christianstadt 2005, are reminiscent of dystopic sci-fi movies, particularly the zone in Tarkovsky’s Stalker, where the characters of the film travel to the savage places by following a belief to find the place that will fulfill the innermost desires.

Contemplating on pain and traumas, I recall Georges Bataille’s meditation technique by looking at a photograph of a Chinese torture scene: “I didn’t choose God as an object of my meditations, but, humanly, a young Chinese. . . shown in photos as covered with blood while the executioner tortures him. I was connected to this unhappy being in ties of horror and friendship.” [3] In the terrifying images, bodies are hung alive and the limbs are cut in a ceremony. Here, the violence is crystal clear, unlike in Garbasz’s images. Bataille believes that an image of pain has the capacity to communicate with a certain past and connect with the victim. In the encounter with an image, we have the tendency to drag that moment into our now — that is how we find meaning. At odds with such an approach, by looking at the image for a long duration, Bataille meditates to feel the moment of what we call a violent act. In a similar fashion, Garbasz looks for traces of Salla’s past, whether on Linienstrasse of Berlin — her birthplace in 1929 — or in a random garden where the ashes of the artist’s grandparents remain scattered, which becomes a tool for her to embrace her own fears. Reminiscent of Bataille’s meditation, Garbasz’s journey allows her to overcome such fears and connect to her mother’s victimization and sadness. The artist channels a time: “My mother had lost parts of her soul in those places and I needed to return to each one to collect them.” [4] This is how her journey turns into a long duration performance where she documents places by following the order of Salla’s memoir and rewrites a story through images, years after its existence. By choosing to take a bulky camera, the artist “forces herself to slow down.” [5] The journey is not only about going back to a certain place and documenting, moreover to experience every step with a certain awareness. The photos depicting dusty rooftops or remains of a barrack intervene and excavate a past that is about to disappear throughout the years.

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Yishay Garbasz, Abandoned home and car, Kumagawa, Okuma-machi, Futaba, Fukushima Nuclear Exclusion Zone (Ritual and Reality series), 2014. Courtesy of the artist and the Ronald Feldman Fine Art, NY.[/caption]

Garbasz’s upcoming book, Ritual and Reality, depicts the life in Japan after the Fukushima disaster. In her studio, the photographs she took in Japan were hung all over the place — images of damaged houses, industrial areas, a golf driving range, a hospital, and a pile of objects in an empty field. Similar to In My Mother’s Footsteps, there is no one around in these images and the narration resembles a memoir. In a disturbingly white hospital waiting room, white blankets are scattered around, hospital beds are aligned, and some medical materials in boxes are placed in an order — probably the expiration date is already over. An eerie feeling lingers in the air. A car is parked near a cute blue house. And nature takes over: There are wild plants in a small garden or bushes in a golf area, instead of perfectly cut grasses.

Storytelling and Portraying Ruins

Is it possible to portray disasters and their aftermaths through photography without exploiting the condition of survivors or serving neoliberal markets? In Making sense of disaster: the cultural studies of disaster, researchers Peer Illner and Isak Winkel Holm analyze how disasters change the social from the perspective of cultural studies. The writers point out the tendency “to view of the aesthetics of a disaster as a kind of ‘anaesthesia’, a harmful way of being unaware of the social production of disaster.” [6] Illner and Holm emphasize what they name as “emergency regime” and governance around the social production of disasters. Writing novels, composing music or making movies also have the potential to create a common sensibility and “determine what we see and how we act in a world ravaged by disaster at an ever-increasing rate.”

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Yishay Garbasz, Fire drill ritual, Tokyo International Forum, Tokyo (Ritual and Reality series), 2014. Courtesy of the artist and the Ronald Feldman Fine Art, NY.[/caption]

At first glance, Garbasz’s imagery calls to mind the idea of ruin porn. [7] The fact that the images don’t show any people around arouses a similar feeling of visiting an urban decay. Examples of ruin porn or ruins photography beautify contemporary archeological sites: untamed and savage buildings commemorate a certain story and generate excitement. Therefore, post-apocalyptical imagination that is fantasied in ruin porn has the potential to transform itself into tourism or a boom in the market of national flags as in the cases of Chernobyl and 9/11 — the neoliberal tendency of turning any kind of material, even traumas, into a market value. How artists and writers inscribe ruins and traumas may lead to an upper class market’s aesthetics or, on the contrary, provide a core for healing. In that manner, where does Yishay Garbasz’s series Ritual and Reality stand?

Fukushima has been a well-known name since 2011. It immediately recalls the largest nuclear disaster since the Chernobyl disaster of 1986. Despite the numbers that the authorities provide in regard to the level of radioactivity and health problems in the region, Garbasz’s observations introduce us to the aftermath of a disaster in everyday lives that is being kept as secret by the authorities. In Ritual and Reality, each image has a caption that gives information about the place through Garbasz’s observations, which is reminiscent of In My Mother’s Footsteps. These lines are crucial to perceive her images. Even their titles are explanatory of situations that are taken place in the region. In her studio, following the same order with the book, the photographer recalls her journey along with a Geiger counter and a hazmat suit to wander around the streets of Takaku, Oto, Ishinomaki, Tokio various prefactures around… She photographed the reactor and learned more about how TEPCO and the authorities disregard the dangers of radioactivity and the unbearable life of evacuees and factory workers.

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Yishay Garbasz, Greenhouse for ornamental growing, Rte 256, Harada, Okuma-machi, Futaba, Fukushima Nuclear Exclusion Zone (Ritual and Reality series), 2014. Courtesy of the artist and the Ronald Feldman Fine Art, NY.[/caption]

Photographs from kasetsus — the Japanese word for temporary dorm-like accommodations — for evacuees of Fukushima illustrate the loneliness and emptiness of souls after a man-made disaster. In the photo №2 Takaku Kasetsu (temporary evacuee dorm) in Chuodai, Iwaki City, Iwaki (2013), few pots with colorful flowers alongside the gray blocks of containers installed repetitively remind the urge of beautification, our rituals to turn a space into a personal place. Survivors want to take their lives back into their hands, despite big Geiger counters on the streets — as in the photo Permanent radiation counter at Kumamachi elementary school, Okuma Kumagawa, Okuma-machi, Furaba, Fukushima Nuclear Exclusion Zone (2013). Luckily, not long ago, some could return to their hometowns with memories of the loss. The damages of flood that took away their loved ones are still discerned on buildings and powerful enough to prompt personal (her/his)stories. Wallpapers are torn, exterior and interior wall materials are torn apart or bent and roof structures are corroded — as in the image 2 Chome-9–11 Chūō Ishinomaki-shi, Miyagi-ken. In another photo, we see a pile of some material and big brown bags reminiscent of a military zone. The title is: Storage of nuclear contaminated materials, Route 6, Fukushima (former Exclusion Zone opened in April 2013) (2013). Stories are crucial to truly interpret the photographer’s intention in the images. Just by looking at them, we might not be capable of telling what they are. However, once one pays close attention to the title, say, the story behind, Garbazs’s images are altered.

On the one hand, demolished hospitals exist as memorials, where people still work in radioactive areas. On the other hand, in another photo of Garbasz from Tokyo, a few kilometers away, there is a Prada store with the best air-conditioning system: chic, glittering, all in extremes. Life continues in another town, where workers are in hazmat suits. Garbasz mentions the hours she spent there, while taking photos with such an outfit. It was hard to drink water or pee — basic acts of a functioning body. In one photo, we see Nuclear Café, where water is no more boiled for tea. In another, there is a sign: “Bright future with nuclear energy” (Futaba, Fukushima Nuclear Exclusion Zone, 2013). A longing for better future, the thirst of speed, and energy of capitalism keep ignoring the danger and eliminate the existence of survivors. Their bodies have no representation and significance anymore, unless they’re workers of energy.

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Yishay Garbasz, In My Mother’s Footsteps, 2009. Courtesy of the artist and the Ronald Feldman Fine Art, NY.[/caption]

Considering the trauma as an organic entity, more than just aestheticizing a ruin, the artist’s dawdling journey depicts a post-trauma — reminiscent of the photos of Salla’s past. As mentioned before, Garbasz’s images might not tell much to the audience without a narrative and one might interpret this as a weakness. However, instead of words, Garbasz uses photography as a medium of storytelling. Reminiscent of a stone in an archeological site or, say, a concrete building in an abandoned city, traumas are decaying bodies that have the capacity to metamorphose according to the needs of the day. The memory of traumas puts one in a dilapidated condition; its existence depends on yours. Part of the body resonates a past — undergoes the traumatic experience repetitively, whereas the other part continues to experience a now. Yet, recalling requiems of various cultures, story telling could function as a remedy. Similarly, whether personal like In My Mother’s Footsteps or collective as in Ritual and Reality, Garbasz urges to create books ad writes short stories of/with images, while traumas keep residing in bodies like a parasite.

Endnotes:

[1] Butler, J and Taylor, S. (2013). Interdependence, https://paulojorgevieira.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/aqui.pdf.

[2] For more information: Abrams, K. (2011–2012). Performing Interdependence: Judith Butler and Sunaura Taylor in the Examined Life. Columbia Journal of Gender and Law, 2, pg. 72–89.

[3] Quoted by Brook, T., Bourgon, J., Blue G. (2008). Death by a Thousand Cuts. USA: Harvard University Press, pg. 240.

[4] Shangler, J. (2009). In Salla’s Footsteps, through Yishay’s Lens. In My Mother’s Footsteps. Berlin: Hatje Cantz Verlag, pg. 8.

[5] Yishay Garbasz Official Website, http://www.yishay.com/footsteps.html.

[6] Illner, P and Holm, I. W. (2016). Making sense of disaster: the cultural studies of disaster. Disaster Research: Multidisciplinary and international perspectives. Ed. R. Dahlberg, O. Rubin, M. T Vendelo. US: Routledge.

[7] For more information: Mullins, P. (August 2012). The Politics and Archeology of “Ruin Porn”. Archeology and Material Culture, https://paulmullins.wordpress.com/2012/08/.

Edited by Özge Ersoy

Göksu Kunak is a writer based in Berlin. They received a BA degree in Interior Architecture and Environmental Design from Bilkent University. Before Berlin, they worked as a Research and Teaching Assistant in the Department of Art History at Hacettepe University where they has their MA as well. Besides working as an editorial correspondent for Ibraaz and in the editorial team of quarterly interview magazine mono.kultur, Göksu has been contributing to several magazines and blogs such as frieze d/e, Ibraaz, Paper Journal, Freunde von Freunden, Berlin Art Link, sleek, e-skop, crap=good, Istanbul’74. Between 2012–2014, they has worked as a writer and project developer as a part of Apartment Project Berlin. They will start their PhD soon on queer chronopolitics in relation to performance art and contemporary dance. Göksu’s short stories and poems can be read at the literary blog leopardskinandlimes and goksukunak.tumblr.com.

Yishay Garbasz finds significance in numbers, often using them to frame aspects of her personal history, memory, and imagination. Garbasz, who also is transgender, previously explored issues of identity during her sexual reassignment surgery, documenting her body in the process. “I’m a very tactile and kinesthetic thinker, this is how I enter things, I enter the world through a very personal space, through my heart.” She is the author of Becoming: A Gender Flipbook and In My Mother’s Footsteps, in which she documented the path of her mother’s path to a Nazi extermination camp, counting the number of steps and photographing her progress periodically, and branded her arm with her mother’s prison camp identification number. These numbers constitute abstracted markers of real-world experiences that Garbasz translates back into materiality through her performances and documentary photographs.

Temporality of Traumas: Yishay Garbasz’s Time Drag through Images was originally published in m-est on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Köken Ergun’s work, which I have been following for the last ten years, has always pushed me to question how the camera intervenes into an event and change the social dynamics. After all, how does the camera record the conditions of belonging or even alter them? Köken and I met a few times in the last year and recorded our conversations. Below is an edited version of these extensive discussions. — Ö.E.

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Köken Ergun, Still from Young Turks​, 2013–15. Two channel video installation with sound. Courtesy of the artist.[/caption]

Özge: Let’s start with your most recent project Young Turks (2013–2015) to discuss how your agency as an artist with a recording camera has changed since I, Soldier, the two-channel video you made in 2006. As of this moment, Young Turks is exhibited at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow, where the installation is centered around a two-channel film projection. [1] In this film, you look at students and teachers who are part of an international network of Turkish schools — which are active in more than 100 countries worldwide — , and document the Turkish Language Olympics, organized back in Turkey, where students from these schools compete in reciting poems and singing songs in Turkish, or performing Turkish folk dances, etc.

For me, there are two conceptual threads in the video. The first one starts with foreign children who prepare for the Olympics in their home country. It continues with the teachers who assist them, the schools that facilitate these interactions, and finally we have you, looking at this particular structure. I think you have a rather distant, observant role here — it’s not easy to figure out your own position about the Turkish schools, their de facto diplomatic mission, their soft power, or what constitutes a culture that is “typically Turkish” for that matter. The second thread starts with foreign children, as well. It continues with the audience who watch these children performing on stage, and ends with you watching the audience with your camera. I believe your interest lies in the multiple acts of watching rather than the politics of this structure.

Köken: The Turkish schools of the Gülen community are part of an expansionist project, and the Olympics are the popular face of this expansion. [2] The Olympics promote activities of the Turkish schools to the Turkish public who are expected to support their expansion in return. The Olympics are also an extension of universal expositions that started in the 19th century — but a smaller and rudimentary version of it. Think about it: This is the opportunity for non-passport holding middle class citizens to see the rest of the world, just like how it was with the universal expositions in the past.

At the Olympics in Izmir, Turkey, the interplay between curiosity and proximity results in most interesting interactions between the host and the “others.” You see women squeeze Ugandan boys’ cheeks, congratulating them for speaking Turkish eloquently, or applause for their folk dance moves, etc. This is what I look at in this project — how people interact and show their feelings in these gatherings. I’m not interested in documenting how the Gülen Movement functions or how Turkey pursues expansionist politics, but rather how these projects are consumed or interpreted by ordinary people. This is why I have a lot of close-ups of the audience as well as fairgoers. What I’m interested in is the aesthetics of this expansionist project.

[embed]https://vimeo.com/157483001[/embed]

Köken Ergun, Young Turks​, 2013–15. Two channel video installation with sound. Courtesy of the artist.

Özge: The audience in Izmir consists mostly of women. In one of the peak moments of the film, your camera captures a middle-aged woman who holds a sign that reads, “This has been our dream.” She has tears in her eyes and a euphoric expression in her face. She seems to take the ownership of the Olympics, she’s proud, and it looks like she’s been waiting for that moment for a while.

Köken: She held that sign for almost two hours, crying silently. No one gave her strange looks. What is it that she’s so proud of? I’m not sure if it’s only about Ugandan boys performing Turkish folkloric dances. It feels to me that she is almost “religiously” proud of a bigger narrative carried on by her country. Holding that banner throughout the event, she must have felt like a flagbearer of this expansionism.

But when you talk to people who work for the Gülen schools abroad, you realize they want to have a softer and friendlier attitude compared to the old colonial powers. In Kenya you have the Austrian School, the French School, but Gülen schools are not called Turkish schools; the one I filmed in Nairobi is called the Light Academy for example. Some teachers are aware of the criticism towards them, that there is a somewhat colonial agenda behind their schools, but they emphasize that they’re against such policy or practice. I assume that popular activities like the Turkish Olympics are made in order to promote this soft approach/face. But whether it transfers to the outside world like that is another matter.

There is an enormous organization behind the Olympics. Hundreds of people work for it throughout the year. Art directors travel to a different country every week, musicians record songs with big orchestras, and teachers produce custom-made choreographies for students/performers. On the one hand, you have this extremely rigorous structure in order to highlight a soft and universalist approach. On the other hand, you have the reaction of the audience back in Turkey, who receives these efforts, I believe, in a completely different way. I’m interested in the interplay between these two and the bizarre spectacle it produces.

In the video, I show people wandering around the fair, holding taxidermized crocodiles, smelling vanilla beans — items that are brought from far away countries where the Turkish schools have reached, sometimes even before the Turkish embassies. As I said before, this is not dissimilar to the interactions at the 19th century universal expositions. That said, in Izmir, you don’t see a human “zoo” where people throw bananas and nuts at foreign students — there’s a rather new type of interaction here: People take zillions of selfies with these kids. There’s a moment in the film where you hear an announcement that says, “Please don’t touch African children too much,” while they’re trying to take photographs with them. This is exactly what I’m looking at — how the middle-class Turks deal with the rest of the world, how they struggle with their inferiority complex, and how all of this turns into a spectacle.

[embed]https://vimeo.com/157479922[/embed]

Köken Ergun, Young Turks​, 2013–15. Two channel video installation with sound. Courtesy of the artist.

Özge: The reception of the Olympics is fragmented through different cameras, including your shaky hand camera, your Director of Photography’s camera on a tripod, the camera of the organization on the crane, and hundreds of cell phones that record what’s happening on the stage at the same time. I wonder where you position yourself in this network of the act of watching. After all, you focus on the audience but you still want your DOP to film the stage.

Köken: Yes, the Olympics are highly documented public events. The multiplicity of these documentations makes me inquire about my own position with the camera in particular and the position of the arts in life in general. The more I make films, the more I question this position. But, nevertheless, I remain to be of the many cameras in any event I shoot. Maybe in the next project, I might turn the camera directly to myself to challenge this. But at the moment I choose to document and to represent.

In Young Turks, I chose to work with two synchronized cameras and later to show them as a two-channel synchronized video. My camera was recording the audience’s reactions when they’re watching the performance on stage, documented by another camera on a tripod. There was a moment when the presenter on the stage said, “We are so grateful to you because you sent your sons from all over Anatolia to Africa.” This is precisely where I wanted to see how people had silent tears in their eyes — this is the detail I’m looking for. And to be able to represent this moment to the audience I needed to show them both the action and the reaction, at the same time.

In the future, if I want to challenge “representation” all together, I will probably look for a different approach, and maybe that approach will be omitting the camera completely.

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Köken Ergun, ​Young Turks installation view Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow​, 2016. ​ Photo by Olga​ A​lexeyenko.[/caption]

Özge: It’s tempting to think that your interest in the Olympics is related to the symbols, images, and materials produced as part of a ritual, which is a recurring theme in your practice. If we go back to your earlier videos, in I, Soldier (2005) and The Flag (2006), you focus on public ceremonies, documenting the rituals of strong, established institutions such as the state or the armed forces. In these works, you are quite distanced from your subject; you rather observe them from a distance. I think that the way you inquire about rituals changes after these works. You turn your camera to immigrants’ weddings in Berlin (Wedding, 2006–08), Filipinos in Tel Aviv (Binibining Promised Land, 2009–10), Caferi Shiites in Istanbul (Ashura, 2010–12), and most recently the Turkish Olympics (Young Turks). The common denominator is that these groups are somehow marginalized in the larger community they live in, and that you spend time with them, following their respective rituals for months. How do you think your perception of rituals has changed over time, through these works?

Köken: For me, rituals are the key to understand society. But my interest in rituals started with an attempt to understand myself. Let me start with I, Soldier (2005, 7 min.). I shot this video at a stadium in Istanbul on May 19th, the National Day for Youth and Sports in Turkey. It looks like a simple documentation of the ceremonies but I believe there’s a sense of revenge and resistance against the state discourse and discipline in this video. I was 28 years old at that time, and I was desperately trying to say, “I’m not one of you.” In the video, there are long moments of close-ups of a high-ranking soldier’s face. Why did I make this choice? I can’t answer it easily but it might have to do with my fascination with macho attitudes in men, it might have to do with me being gay. But at that time, I didn’t realize that there was something to do with my own emotions.

There was a similar sense of revenge in The Flag (2006, 9 min.) that I shot on April 23rd, the National Sovereignty and Children’s Day. This time, there was a strategy behind it, in the sense that I wanted to have a second national celebration to complement I, Soldier. So it was a professional decision, not an intuitive one — it was the first time that I aestheticized my experience. I see this as the first moment of my “degeneration,” as this was the attitude of a professional artist. The word “degeneration” doesn’t have to have negative connotations. I mean that with this decision I included myself into the system of artistic production and started to take decisions somewhat informed by the norms of the art world, as I perceive it.

After I finished these videos, I moved to Berlin and something changed in me there. Although I spent a lot of time living abroad before, mainly in New York and in London, they were not permanent stays, but my moving to Berlin was to stay and for the very first time in my life I felt like a foreigner, a guest, a being without a country. I felt what we call gurbet for the first time. [3] So when I wanted to make a new work there, I intuitively looked at an immigrant community. I started going to weddings of Turkish and Kurdish people there, and in the end I produced a three-channel video installation. This was a professional decision too, due to my ongoing fascination with Eija Lissa Ahtila’s work, which I saw for the first time at Okwui Enwezor’s Documenta in 2002. My background is theater, so I was also interested in the theatricality, in the idea of stage, in dance, in make-up, in the movement that dominates these celebrations.

The theme of gurbet continued when I started going back and forth to the Levant. [4] This geography is full of dislocated people. I encountered the Filipino community in Lebanon for the first time. I made a work about them in Israel, titled Binibining Promised Land (2009–11, 38 min.). It was while doing this project that I became aware of the fact that I wasn’t only making work about a certain social group, which remained unseen in the greater society but also the very process of my “bonding” with that group was part of the work itself.

I was in Tel Aviv for a residency when I came across this fantastic poster of a Filipino beauty pageant to take place inside the main bus station. I immediately contacted the organizer from the phone number written on the poster, introducing myself as a filmmaker who wants to see and maybe film what they are doing. The voice on the other side of the phone just said: “Sure! Come tomorrow, my friend.” The next day I found myself at their rehearsals in an ordinary corridor of that giant complex. I just observed what they were doing without filming. An hour into the rehearsals we became “best friends.” Two hours into it, the girls invited me for dinner at their shared apartment. Three hours later we were making noodle soup at a cramped flat for a group of 50 Filipinos; all of them guest workers working all around Israel, mostly as caregivers. I was enjoying myself tremendously and felt extremely comfortable in their company. They said the same for my company. Somewhere in between I started taking photos but it was more for them to put on Facebook than for me to use them in an art project. I forgot about the film camera altogether. I think I even left it there before we went out to the church for the evening service. After that, as a larger group, we went back to the bus terminal and partied until the morning.

Then I started meeting them every Saturday afternoon — the start of their off-day — , and hanging out with them in various joints inside the bus station until Sunday afternoon when they would board buses and head of back to the cities or towns where they worked. I was also helping them to organize the beauty pageant and other events, which I documented with my camera. This footage would compose my film Binibining Promised Land. But I felt that the time I spent with them and the interaction we had was actually the most important thing. I realized that this was becoming the main characteristic of my art(istic) practice. I also thought that the audience of the film would not be able to feel that interaction between us and this was the first time I questioned representation. I thought about leaving representation altogether. In other words, leave art, because I believed that the process was more fun and satisfying than the end product — the artwork. But now I think differently. As much as the artwork about a people will not really represent that people or my experiences with them, and certainly not all of the personal transformation I lived through that process, it still has a value as something to be made and shared. In fact, all the social groups that have been subjects of my works wanted to be known and seen by a wider public. This leaves me with a sort of duty and this has to be carried out with a certain ethic that affects both sides.

Anyway, at this point in my life, I can say that rituals and the “art” that I do about them are tools for me to bond with different social groups. This enriches my life experience.

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​Original poster for Bininbining Pilipinas Israel 2009.[/caption]

Özge: You mention that you like to become friends with the people we see in your videos, that you like to keep in touch with them after the work is finalized. For me, that type of friendship starts on an uneven base, because you have the camera in your hand, which immediately creates a power hierarchy. So I tend to find your statement a bit naïve, for lack of a better word. After all, you’re the one who selects the images, who decides on the sequence, and ultimately who shows them in a format you want, also choosing your audience. So I’d like to go back to this issue. How do you negotiate the power dynamic that the camera introduces immediately?

Köken: This is an issue that has to be evaluated case by case. What you’re saying is a generalization too. Not all interactions formed through the camera have to be selfish and calculating acts. Let me talk about Ashura (2010–2012, 20 min.) here. In this work, you see me filming some members of the Caferi community in Istanbul rehearsing for the day of Ashura when they perform a reenactment of the Battle of Karbala. However, I didn’t start this work with a camera in my hand. I first watched the Ashura rituals for some time, and then I called them to say that I wanted to meet them. We met and stayed in touch for about six months when I started building friendships with some members of the community. It was with these friends that I discussed how to best document their ceremonies, which led the way for them to invite me to their rehearsals from the beginning, a month before the day of Ashura. In the first two weeks, I went there without a camera and met many people from the neighborhood. Their religious leaders greeted me saying “You are one of us now.” When I felt it was the right time to shoot, I asked them if I could bring my camera with me. Some were surprised, and some complained about me not bringing my camera beforehand. They also wanted to be seen by other people. I believe I have built that relationship of trust through my personal experience. In other words, I created an ethical proximity with my subjects through interactive cognition, not with a general idea of ethics that I carried from outside.

[embed]https://vimeo.com/58366966[/embed]

​Köken Ergun, Ashura, 2010–2012. Three channel video installation with sound. Courtesy of the artist.

Özge: I’m also curious about how the events you record change with your presence there with your camera. I think there’s a breaking point in Ashura where you move away from the event, the rehearsal, and turn your camera to the backstage. Something crucial happens here. A young man looks directly into the camera and asks you, “Do I look handsome, brother?” Here you make your presence visible to the viewer for the first time.

Köken: I think that moment is the climax of Ashura. Something really shifts when the camera no longer produces a distance between the subject and myself. At that moment we are almost deleting the camera from our experience: I’m no longer the director or the artist but someone close to them, an insider, and also someone from the group I’m creating a representation of. The artist as the tool of representation is no longer instrumentalized. There is always a way to make the camera disappear.

Özge: I’d like to ask you how we could think about rituals with and through art forms. How could art contribute to the ways we discuss the inexhaustible need for rituals and social customs in today’s world?

Köken: I think rituals preceded culture and religion. Over time, they evolved into culture, religion and even arts. Then these broke into fractions: “our” religion, “their” religion, etc.

There is still a need for new myths and rituals, even in communities where spirituality doesn’t play an essential role in social life anymore. Some German scholars see theater as a ritual for communities where religion is no longer dominant. I agree with that. For example Wagner’s Bayreuth festival has become a ritualistic act for the followers of his mythology inspired theatre experience. Everyone who goes to Bayreuth knows the plot of The Ring by heart, and there is almost nothing new except for the interpreters. They attend the performances with a sort of spiritual commitment, to experience the performance once again and also to be in the “special,” church-like environment — the theatre that Wagner built himself. The whole experience of Bayreuth has so many codes, repetitions, rules, forms, and invariances — all characteristics of rituals. Lights go off, ouverture, act 1, intermission, long picnic lunch outside, a certain type of food eaten, certain dresses worn, etc. There are so many forms that resemble rituals in the general sense. You can even think about clubbing as one of the modern rituals, with its specific codes and repetitions. So when art looks at rituals, it is actually looking at its origins.

[caption id=”attachment_2882" align=”aligncenter” width=”640"]

Köken Ergun, ​Ashura, installation view at SALT Galata, Istanbul, 2014. Photo by Batu Tezyüksel.[/caption]

Özge: I’m thinking about a conversation with philosopher Boris Groys, where he says that both contemporary art and contemporary religion use the same tropes and tools, such as digital networks, performances, the principle of participation, and the combination of texts and images. [5] Both are interested in the audience, in the public sphere, and both have the claim of immortality if we think of art’s emphasis on conversation, restoration and reproduction. Do you agree with this argument?

Köken: Omar Kholeif and I discussed this previously. [6] I’m someone who believes that art and religion have more in common than arts and science. So I agree with Groys to a certain extent. But I think it’s too soon to think that the arts can turn into a religion. There are of course ritualistic aspects in the arts, such as museum-going or opera going. But when you look at the history of religions over 1,000 years, contemporary art is too young of a phenomenon to be called a religion. I think Enlightenment is a much more powerful religion in and of itself. Contemporary art could be only a small extension of that. But there are positions that challenge that view, too. I mean the position of seeing contemporary art as a secular and enlightened practice.

In 2015, I participated in an exhibition titled “Rainbow in the Dark” (curated by Sebastian Cichocki and Galit Eilat in collaboration with SALT, Istanbul). [7] The curators suggested inquiring into the power of popular religious and spiritual imagination and what kind of a role this played in artistic production in recent years. They found out that there are “religious” artists too. It was one of the rare contemporary art exhibitions that looked into religion with and without a critical approach at the same time. In fact some works were looking at the Enlightenment with a critical approach.

Özge: To me, it looks like neither religion nor contemporary arts offers salvation, but both articulate themselves around the sense of belonging — participation and forming communities. I wonder if it’s possible to build collective subjects, through either of them. Or how could contemporary art complicate the way we think about the potential of that collective subject?

Köken: There has always been a need to act collectively — religions and rituals are both ways of touching and living together. But our contemporary codes are rather individualistic. It’s a struggle to get involved in the collective. This happened in Tahrir, Tel Aviv, New York, and Istanbul, but we’re not exactly sure how to continue. That’s why it might be useful now to think about and understand the collective defined in religions. Scholar and mystic Ibn-ül Arabi changed the way I look at these issues. He likens belief to a wall and the prophets to the bricks that make it up, along with the people. I like the sense of patience and perseverance here. This is the collective attitude.

Both religion and art use abstraction: there’s a belief in and an aesthetic attachment to abstract things. Religion has been hijacked and misled to strictly organizational and rigid structures as in the case of the hierarchy of the Church in Christianity. Much of the old religions have lost their promise of a universal collectivism that had never been rigidly defined but was in fact grew pretty emotionally as well as collectively at the time. People are in search of new ways of establishing a collective. Why shouldn’t art lead the way?

January 2015–February 2016, Istanbul

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLzC3XLEtBA​[/embed]

Köken Ergun, ​I, Soldier​, 2006. Two channel video installation with sound. Courtesy of the artist.

Endnotes:

[1] Developed by Garage Museum of Contemporary Art (Moscow) and Protocinema (Istanbul and New York), this exhibition is the first comprehensive presentation of the project.

[2] This primarily religious community is led by the reformist Turkish-Muslim preacher Fethullah Gülen, who has been living on a secluded compound in rural Pennsylvania since 1998 when he faced imprisonment in Turkey by the military backed judiciary. Along with a global network of schools in over 100 countries, the movement also runs a media empire and several business organizations. Since their initiation, the movement has always attempted to ally itself with the state, gradually becoming a part of the Turkish Republic’s strategy of international dominance.

[3] Absence from home, in Turkish.

[4] The Levant is an approximate historical geographical term referring to a large area in the Eastern Mediterranean, including Cyprus, Syria, Jordan, and Palestine, among other countries.

[5] “A Conversation Between Boris Groys and Maria Hlavajova: In the Absence of the Horizon,” The Return of Religion and Other Myths, eds. Maria Hlavajova et al. (Utrecht: BAK, 2009), 73–81.

[6] “Who’s Afraid of Religion?: Köken Ergun in conversation with Omar Kholeif” Ibraaz, 8 May 2014, www.ibraaz.org/interviews/133.

[7] For more information, see: saltonline.org/en#!/en/959/karanlikta-gokkusagi.

Edited by Merve Ünsal

///

Köken Ergun (b. 1976, Istanbul) studied acting at the Istanbul University and completed his postgraduate diploma degree in Ancient Greek Literature at King’s College London, followed by an MA degree on Art History at the Bilgi University. After working with American theatre director Robert Wilson, Ergun became more involved with video and film. His multi-channel video installations have been exhibited internationally at institutions, including Palais de Tokyo, Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam, KIASMA, Digital ArtLab Tel Aviv, Casino Luxembourg, Protocinema, Wilhelm Hack Museum, SALT, and Kunsthalle Winterthur. His film works have received several awards at film festivals including the “Tiger Award for Short Film” at the 2007 Rotterdam Film Festival and the “Special Mention Prize” at the 2013 Berlinale. Ergun’s works are included in public collections such as the Centre Pompidou, the Greek National Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Kadist Foundation.

Özge Ersoy is a curator and art writer based in Istanbul. She is the program manager of collectorspace and the managing editor of m-est.org. ozgeersoy.tumblr.com

This Has Been Our Dream was originally published in m-est on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

İz’s text was initially published in Turkish on 5harfliler, an online feminist publication. I found it significant to include the English translation of this text on m-est.org, because the fragmented, diaristic tone and İz’s inclusion of her comrades on this journey — the texts that she took with her — is an important counterweight to the monolithic statements and actions that the people of Turkey are being subjected to. — Merve Ünsal

İz Öztat

21.12.2015

As I’m reading the news, I see the photographs taken by security forces in Sur and shared with the press. In the photograph pointing at the barricades put up by the Separatist Terror Organization, graffiti partly visible through the rebar catches my eye:

RESIS

LIF

22.12.2015

I come across this on social media:

The path to cope with these days, to stop the war, the deaths, the destructions goes through voicing our demand for peace in unison with more zeal and courage and being in solidarity with the people of the region. For this reason, we who are for peace have decided to organize this march called I am Walking for Peace with the goal of multiplying the voices against war.

I decide to partake in this instinct.

24.12.2015

I am with The Dilemma of Orpheus: Since those who survived were able to survive by denying that which was unbearable in the Catastrophe, since it was not possible to survive without turning the Catastrophe into no longer a catastrophe, since what those who survived irrevocably lost was the very capacity to speak of the loss, since no narrative can reintegrate with language the reality of the disintegration of language, the Catastrophe has not been told.

Loss cracks representation and creates its own expressions. The border that separates the dead and the living is not there. I, are not singular, but plural.

27.12.2015

At the Bodrum Municipal Square, those who are setting out and those who are seeing them off are making placards: I am walking for peace so that we don’t exhaust our words. The musicians with whom we had sung Streams will flow free at the Boğazpınar Festival are seeing the caravan off. No slogans, no banners, we leave Bodrum cooing like birds.

I don’t know anyone. As soon as we set out for the road, everyone is asked for a sentence to be shared on social media explaining why they are participating in the march. To be able to look friends in Amed in the eye…

We go a short ways and reach Muğla, the Roboski Commemoration is continuing at the square.

Since the dead cannot be buried in the absence of justice, I prepare myself to speak with all the ghosts I run into.

I have two books with me, one is Among the Ruins. I read from 1911:

I repeat, we all must recognize the true face of our blood-soaked country, and be able to look at it head on with courage. What I saw and heard is capable of shaking an entire state to its foundations. Theoretically no one is contradicting this. This feeling became an important urge, this is the main feeling which drove me to write these pages without reserves of any kind, as a free citizen, an authentic daughter of my country, with the same rights and duties that everyone has. These pages should be read not as the fruit of an Armenian woman’s hypersensitivity, but as the spontaneous and sincere impressions of a human being on the same level as everyone else.

In order to bear witness to the Cilicia events of 1909 in which 25,000 Armenians were killed in and around Adana, the author sets out on a fact finding mission with a delegation a few months after the events. The question she asks and makes one ask is: Writing and imagination, can the Catastrophe be measured by these?

28.12.2015

We start the day in front of the train station, commemorating those killed in the Ankara Massacre. Digital prints with their names are on the ground with carnations, side by side, on top of one another. Their voices turn into a howl, I cannot hear what they are saying.

I have a few hours in the city before we get back together for the meeting in the evening. We are wandering around with my new comrade. We enter the shop of a watch repairer. When we ask how he learned the craft his life story unfolds before us. He tells us that he learned it from his Syrian (paternal) grandmother whom he thinks was Jewish, after leaving Ağrı for university and working in various fields he returned to this vocation. He says he does not want to be buried in these lands: When I die I will not be able to defend my rights.

I want him to fix time; to bind the time of trauma that broke from before and after, to link the hours spent with ghosts in purgatory to the flowing time, to stop the time so that we are not too late.

We have our first meeting. The experiences that prepared everyone for this journey and the reasons behind the need to go to Diyarbakır are different. We are afraid, we are brave, we are few, we are many, we are free, we are feminists, we are conscientious objectors, we are teachers, we are students, we are homemakers, we are mothers, we are the civil society, we are anarchists, we are citizens, we are environmentalists, we are public servants, we are academicians, we are workers, we are unemployed, we are precarious, we are writers, we are white-collared, we are artists, we are a commune on the move, we are being silenced, we hear voices, we want to raise our voices. We need to make decisions together. Consensus or majority? The feelings and thoughts of every single one of us are important, we proceed with consensus. We merge!

29.12.2015

Flowing through the streets in single file we reach the parliament. We demand a return to the negotiation table, then we talk with two parliamentarians who have come to meet us: Do not say support, support is something given from the outside, we are together. A word from her lips clings to me, like the haunting ghosts; denier, denier, denier…

We continue on our way, increasing in numbers, we gradually get to know one another. We reach Adana. We arrive at a table already set with food, then disperse to be hosted in the homes of our friends yet unbeknown to us.

Sleep escapes me, I read from 1911:

With its lack of any moral concern and myriad consequences, the dimensions of the catastrophe were infinite.

Am I able to comprehend the word catastrophe? Construction works will start after the operation. Can I make sense of the catastrophe? In the place where mourning and comprehension is impossible, I fall asleep with my ghosts.

In this destroyed, annihilated city, the high tower of the Armenian Episcopal Church, the only one left standing seemed to contemplate the surrounding ruins. The bell, now silent; hung down like a paralyzed tongue. Since the catastrophe, its sounds, whether sad or joyous, had been ceased as a sign of mourning…

Was it really ceased as a sign of mourning?

30.12.2015

On the way from Adana to Urfa, the bus transforms into a utopic capsule and detaches from dimensions of time and space. I ask everyone which books they have brought along and get to know my comrades through what they are reading. There is a suggestion to hold a forum. A stage is set up at the front of the bus, as it gets dark, lighting solutions are found. We manage to form a circle in a rectangle and listen to each other.

The idea of sinking deep into the heart of the catastrophe produced a gloomy impatience in all of us, nevertheless we walked on the deck in silence until late at night…

My friend who is a teacher in Cizre receives a text message. He finds out that a medic he knows was shot and killed while treating a wounded woman. As the distance shortens it becomes impossible to console or be consoled. The youth in the back seats invent new lyrics for halay. So that words are not exhausted…

31.12.2015

At four in the morning, we set out for Diyarbakır. Once everyone has had their tea, we work on the press statement that will be read upon our arrival. As we cross the Diyarbakır provincial border we meet in a common language. Snow and birds greet us!

Workers are shoveling the heaps of snow in front of the municipality with wooden tools which I learn is called berfıng. In the space they have cleared, halay starts accompanied by the new lyrics written by the youth. We are shoulder to shoulder, we are cheerful, we are not ashamed!

Inside, I listen: A society cannot be engineered… No one can know where a flowing body of water will change its course… Giving voice to peace… Clamor… Destruction…They closed the gates, the city is trapped inside the castle walls…A war that wants to end life… Dead bodies waiting out in the open… We saw that our scream was not left hanging in a void… We are individuals, we are the people… We salute the free and equal future of the peoples of Turkey.

When we get out we see the municipality square is filling up. Looking at the faces of the people we move toward the front. Right there, the being who died in Cizre yesterday; the acquaintance of the friend sitting next to me and now the photograph carried by the person standing next to me. The dead and the living merge. I hear the words I have come to surrender my will to you, then a stun grenade explodes. Nobody moves. Since we know that the Peace Group comprised of intellectuals and artists who reached Diyarbakır a day before was able to walk to Sur together with the people, we are thinking we too can walk with the already obtained permission.

Hidden behind white head-clothes, that endless procession of heads in mourning rippled and eddied as if tossed by a storm.

Putting the rest into words becomes difficult, the schizophrenic crack deepens. I do not know how to overcome the discrepancy between what I have experienced, and that which has been reflected in the press and alleged in the court records. I realize that the word is yet to be uttered and that I have not made an effort to learn the language here. I arrive at a dead-end where words are imbued differently.

We find out that of the 25 people detained following the police attack without warning, five were from the I am Walking for Peace initiative. I realize that I do not yet know the meaning of the word detention in this geography. I sign: In our view, these detentions aim to sustain and consolidate the atmosphere of intimidation that has already been created, to prevent any act of solidarity with the Kurdish people and to isolate them.

The next day, everyone is talking about the sounds; the sounds of missiles, the sounds of falling. Someone says, we grew cold, inside…

Give us blacks we are in mourning. Write to İstanbul! Have them send us black cloths.

Yet no one here wants to wear blacks. They generously offer their colors. I go to an exhibition. I come across life in Gelincik [Poppy]. In front of a demolished home, four bodies are pressing on, holding on to one another. The one in the front is holding a globe. The contours are black, figures and the background merge into one another; yellow, green, red. We are cheerful, we are living! And I learn the other name for living.

On the fourth day of detention, our friends are brought into court. As we wait, we wander the margins of the city walls where you can still walk. In a teahouse ensconced within the city walls two white doves stand above the cupboard. They cannot fly. Three things fall one after another. We shiver. I want to erase from my body the sound I heard, in its stead I try to put sounds from the poet. I call from 28 Kanunisani [28 January] written in 1923: woof… woof… gobs… spit

We buy simit and sit at a coffee house. From the news we find out that it was rockets that fell, and one killed a woman at the breakfast table where it landed. Drinking tea around the stove; I go into a trance with the fire, music and Dağ [Mountain] I take from a shelf: a bowl of snake / take it use in river’s stead / so long as you restore me to my mountain / you the shaman who knows my ancestors

The judge decides to release our friends pending trial. The court case will continue. They have to live with the knowledge that everything they produce can be turned into evidence against them. The beautiful child of the home that is hosting us draws cartoons every day. A man holding a package in his hand says, Man what’s in this, and in the next panel he is lying on the ground; the thing he is holding explodes.

Due to weather conditions our flight is canceled twice. We go to the home of a family generous enough to host eight people on the mattresses they have made themselves. We collect snow from outside. The mother of the home pours her homemade molasses on the snow. We plunge our spoons into the bowl. We are cheerful, we are together!

We sleep. The snow melts, water finds the newly formed cracks; it merges, holds, slushes up, overflows! If this schizophrenic crack would be riven, riven so that finally, we can be islands…

This is when the officiant, turned toward the assembly, said, while making the sign of the cross:

“Khağağutyun amenetsun”*

***

* (Armenian) May peace be with you.

Titles of the works and quotes are italicized; names of persons have been deliberately omitted.

Translators’ note: The English translation of quotes from Among the Ruins has been taken in part from The National Revolution by Marc Nichanian and Amid the Ruins translated into English by Jennifer Manoukian.

Translation by Liz Erçevik Amado, Irazca Geray

İz Öztat is an artist, who lives and works in Istanbul. www.izoztat.com

I hear was originally published in m-est on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The below text is written in conjunction with “Why Are You Here,” the first exhibition of TOZ, the artist-run space that has just opened its doors in the Kadikoy neighborhood of Istanbul. This essay is a continuation of our ongoing interest in thinking about the status of the image and the role it plays in shaping near history. “Why Are You Here” departs from a series of propositions made about and around photographs taken in areas characterized by distress, asking the inexhaustible question: What type of claims do images make, and how does the viewer respond to them?

[caption id=”attachment_2859" align=”aligncenter” width=”640"]

Valentino Bellini and Eileen Quinn, Limbo, 2015. 17-year-old Bassur, immigrant from Senegal, is portrayed in his kitchen making dinner. Bassur arrived in Zarzis in April 2015, rescued at sea by local fishermen. He now lives with Adama and Dousu in Zarzis.[/caption]

Could the photograph become a performative act? How can it transform the relationship between the photographer, the photographed, and the viewer? For me, “Why are you here,” the first exhibition of TOZ, takes these questions as a departure point. Bringing together works by Valentino Bellini & Eileen Quinn, Emanuele Satolli, and Merve Ünsal, the exhibition is placed in an artist’s studio-cum-exhibition space — a storefront, to be precise — , which also amplifies this proposition.

Among the works in the exhibition, Limbo (2015) has the most obviously documentary sensibility. Conceived by photographer Valentino Bellini and researcher Eileen Quinn, the project combines a series of photographs and a narrative text on people who have been affected by people smuggling in Tunisia. At the center of the installation is the photograph of a middle-aged man standing in a private garden, captured from a safe distance. (The caption introduces him as a Tunisian who was recently repatriated from Belgium). This photograph is placed against a gloomy seaspace with dark clouds over a wavy sea, captured at twilight — a moment of half-light, a transitional state that sets the tone for the series. On the next wall are clusters of smaller size images: There are fishermen who are involved in rescuing refugees on the water, as well as rescued immigrants who are portrayed individually in their private space, the apartment they share together. A refugee camp stands out as another living space with the bare minimum to share, to sleep, and to pray — all related to surviving the in-between moments.

In the installation, the photographs are attached to their captions and the quotes taken from the interviews conducted with their subjects (both in the text and audio format), which document glimpses of their daily lives. But what does it mean to look at these faces that emerge from places of neglect and oblivion? For me, these images don’t readily reproduce the categories of victim, perpetrator, and bystander. Focusing on the banal representations of various people affected by the migrant issues, they don’t attempt to recreate the assumed causality between the representation of an event and the protocols to change it. On the contrary, it is the subjects who perform for the camera’s gaze that actively shape and participate in the perception of the images. In other words, the resulting photographs don’t simply describe these men, but rather perform an action — an appeal to the viewer — , and thus turn into “events” where the subjects present an ongoing claim, suggesting a space of negotiation.

[caption id=”attachment_2857" align=”aligncenter” width=”640"]

Emanuele Satolli, In the bag for north, 2015. Andres Sanchez, 42, from El Salvador. He lived and worked in Virginia. Two years ago he was caught during a normal police check when he was driving. He was deported. He’s trying to go back to Virginia. He’s traveling with no bag because he wants to look like a local.[/caption]

Occupying the storeroom of TOZ downstairs, Emanuele Satolli’s In the bag for north (2015) calls for a similar interpretation of the potential of still photographic images. The title of the work contains a sense of exit and destination, which is placed in contrast with the claustrophobic feeling of the space with low ceilings and no windows. The short introductory text, made available on the way to downstairs, informs that Satolli takes photographs of undocumented immigrants traveling from Guetamala to the US. In the heart of the installation, six wooden boxes lie on the floor, each holding a photograph that captures personal items taken out of an immigrant’s bag. Daily objects, such as pills, sanitary items, and mobile phones, are all arranged in a grid and photographed against a concrete floor and from a distance, suggesting a sort of forensic aesthetics. These photographs are somehow capable of telling stories on behalf of the immigrants in question, revealing patterns of their needs and urgencies. Take the example of the image that features a tiny Virgin Mary statue, placed next to a hair gel and toilet paper, giving away personal details about what is irreplaceable, vital to survive. The most powerful image for me is the least visually crowded photograph, which shows only a pair of glasses — tactfully using a minimal language to voice the need to blend in or rather to disappear.

[caption id=”attachment_2860" align=”aligncenter” width=”427"]

Emanuele Satolli, In the bag for north, 2015. Andres Sanchez, 42, from El Salvador.[/caption]

The large-scale photographs hung on the walls hint at those who carry these items in their bags. These portraits are taken in a dimly lit indoor space, presumably a safe haven for protection. Although a few divert their eyes from the camera, most of them directly look into it, suggesting a demand for getting noticed — something that they would not be able to favor in their journey to their destination in the north. Thereby, the photographs temporarily serve as speech acts, asking for a provisional visibility. Featuring excerpts from a Guatemalan radio that broadcasts news about immigration, the audio piece that occupies the space furthers that sense of distance and in-betweenness, creating a gap between what is heard and expected, what’s intended and achieved or failed in the end.

[caption id=”attachment_2858" align=”aligncenter” width=”640"]

Merve Ünsal, From a Window series, 2015.[/caption]

The act of seeing what is considered to be private is also present in Merve Ünsal’s From a window (2015). Installed on the ground floor, the work uses three monitors to show static images coupled with narratives that the artist recorded herself. The first image is a close-up of a window with metal frames shot from outside, allowing a sort of futile voyeurism: There is no one standing by it, except an empty chair that builds up an anticipation of someone to show up. The second image is an abstracted fragment of a beige-colored building façade, imperfect with its cracks, spots, and dangling cables on the side. The last one is the most obvious about where the artist stands, showing an urban view from the inside of a window. In the audio pieces, Ünsal speaks about the need to watch, the desire to recreate what one sees and cannot capture, and the urge to continue to see things outside. Here she explores a personal pursuit as well as the potential of static images, using a monotonous, flat voice: “These uncertainties constitute a layer, as thin as a pair of stockings, between you and the reality,” the artist says, “These stockings are so seductive to the extent that they lose their function; they’re there only for you to touch them.” The work stands out as a rather intimate inquiry, and questions how one crosses the threshold between the inside and the outside, somehow never giving up on making images.

Departing from her own daily rituals of looking and observing, Ünsal tries to build intimacy between her, her view, and her viewer. Here the trope of window becomes a placeholder for thresholds, for obstacles. But really, when does the camera turn into a protective shield or a window through which one reaffirms a power hierarchy? In her text-based gesture attached to the glass window of the storefront gallery, Ünsal creates another threshold, the one that sits between passers-by and the confined space of the exhibition. Only visible from outside, her sign reads: “All horrors are dulled by routine.” This quote (taken from Roberto Bolaño’s By Night in Chile) poses an essential question for all the works on display here: What type of engagement does one seek to keep looking at images, regardless of what they show, be it images of distress or the banal details of daily life?

[caption id=”attachment_2861" align=”aligncenter” width=”640"]

Merve Ünsal with Ece Eldek, All horrors are dulled by routine, 2016.[/caption]

For me, “Why are you here” goes beyond the affirmation of the customary tropes of documentary photography, as it triggers an inquiry on the mediations between images and the idea of change. “Why are you here” is no longer the usual question an immigrant receives at in-betweens; it rather becomes a question addressed to the viewer himself/herself. After all, image-making is not only about producing images. It is rather a constant negotiation that exists in the gap between the image and what it attempts to represent. That said, let’s remember that the performative potential of the photograph depends on its receiver. So now, what does the viewer desire to see?

Özge Ersoy is a curator and art writer based in Istanbul. She is the program manager of collectorspace and the managing editor of m-est.org. ozgeersoy.tumblr.com

On Hold was originally published in m-est on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Is it possible to adopt an image, welcoming it into one’s familial and legal circle? [1] The speculation has been floating around in my head since 2013 when I first laid eyes on it on Screendump. Its author, conceptual artist, photographer, and “myth-maker” Joan Fontcuberta, makes the case that “post-photography is nothing more than photography adapted to our online life” — and, I would like to propose in the following essay, our creative methods. What was it about the potential of the immaterial image that led me, as an artist, to paint almost exclusively, although my practice remains firmly entrenched in photography? Writing this has proved to be an illuminative process during which I became more and more self-conscious in my practice and motives — through my roots in photography to post-photography, and eventually, painting photographs.

I thought of the quote again last summer when Özge Ersoy, one of m-est.org’s editors, and I were having coffee and she mentioned, in reference to my recent gravitation from photography to painting, the case of documentary photographer and Magnum Photos member Susan Meiselas and her subject from the Guatemalan war (referred to as “Molotov Man”), unceremoniously decoupaged and decontextualized by painter Joy Garnett to be used as basis for a canvas. Magnum Photos made a meandering and ultimately abandoned attempt to limit the painter’s use of the image, in itself a reflection of image-makers’ general struggle to assert copyright in the age of the Internet, which Meiselas herself concedes, exasperatedly, is probably a losing battle. We talked about how I knew what images to paint. Did I use my own photographs or others’? If it was the latter, how did one avoid potentially ethically/legally compromising situations?

Naturally the issue of copyright presents a conundrum of both the personal and public variety for the artist, specifically photographers, for whom the in-camera images and thus their presence and testimony are the currency they deal in. I was reminded of the iconic image of Che Guevera, one of the most familiar, widely circulated images of our time that, just like Meiselas’s Molotov Man, was severed from its context and came to merely represent a universal, messianic icon of resistance. (This documentary that covers the whole story is fascinating.) Post-Internet, this sort of thing has become a commonplace occurring, with predicaments such that of Molotov Man one among countless others. To strip a photograph of its original context in this manner is tantamount to erasing both the photojournalist’s and her subject’s presence at the event photographed, rendering null the “debt of specificity” Meiselas says she owes her subjects.

Because of my proximity to the issues concerning photographs and their subjects, I am doubly cautious in taking liberties with images on the Internet. It helps to follow the road already paved by appropriation art, or as it has also been dubbed in its post-Internet configuration, “neo-appropriation”, which had a predecessor in the work of Sherrie Levine: specifically, her series After Walker Evans, featuring the acclaimed photographs of Walker Evans rephotographed by Levine and presented as her own work — hijacked, if you will. When I first studied it years ago, I was impressed by the clever emphasis on photography’s dependence on contextual clarification well before anything like the Internet was around — it is like an early hypothetical positing of eventually quite real scenarios such as Molotov Man. Predictably, it will seem now, when the work was exhibited in 1981, the Estate of Walker Evans saw it as copyright infringement and, in a twist I presume was due to lack of other plausible legal action, acquired them and prohibited their sale. [2]

[caption id=”attachment_2846" align=”aligncenter” width=”455"]

Joy Garnett , Molotov, 2003.[/caption]

[caption id=”attachment_2847" align=”aligncenter” width=”481"]

Sherrie Levine, After Walker Evans: 4, 1981.[/caption]

Now post-photography has begun to offer clearer codes for what’s what. “Virtual photographers” wander the virtual archives of Google Street View, making entire documentary series out of screenshots, reinterpret the work of the previous generation of photographers — which, in an “After Sherrie Levine” arc, can involve taking pictures of screens — and attempt to pin down the worldwide web of communication tenuously forming afresh each day with the morsels of information users provide, arguably all fair use due to taking place in the Internet equivalent of public space. As such, the issue remains as to how to figure out the ethics, our “debt of specificity” (which I don’t think is limited to only the subjects of photographs)? How does photographing a photograph and painting it differ in that regard? In one case the redundant double act of photographing — with the referent caption as safety net — gives the viewer a sense of the artist’s intentions, whereas painting is an entirely different practice, one of representation versus presentation that allows the painter to make the image her own. This isn’t something to make light of in the age of intellectual property, yet with images so readily available now, if not downright thrown at us, many feel entitled to perusing on their own terms what they feel has come to have direct relevance to their own experience.

What “virtual photographers” do, by contrast, is recontextualize images: what Fontcuberta suggests we refer to as adoption. Choosing that word over appropriation implies that the adopter is responsible for the image: to take care of the image in the absence of a parent and in a more open context, with awareness of a watchful public. Most of post-photography focuses on “public” images, Google Images and Street View presently appearing to be its most fertile grounds for source material. Likewise, the most defining characteristic of the images I pick is their anonymity: free-floating bits caught on a hook and forced to become part of the physical world. (So much of the Internet brings the ocean analogy to mind — all the images like messages in bottles, and it’s up to the users to determine the content.)

[caption id=”attachment_2848" align=”aligncenter” width=”640"]

Jon Rafman, from The Nine Eyes of Google Street View, 9-eyes.com.[/caption]

The first painting I made was in 2012, of a photograph I found on fail blog thisisphotobomb.com. Thisisphotobomb exclusively features photographs “ruined” by the titular antic: most commonly, when people are earnestly posing for a photograph and the photobomber sneaks up behind them and pulls a hideous face as the shutter is pressed. These pictures are “fails,” discarded by their owners, the reverse chronology of the Internet ensuring their swift burial under an oncoming flux of newer posts. I was interested to see that through paint, a hilariously mistimed snapshot of (presumably) a father bending down to adjust his toddler’s shirt was transformed into some sort of comment on parenthood and identity (or so people who were unaware of the origin of the image interpreted it at the time).

The reflex for picking out orphaned images stood up and declared itself. Noting that the everyday plethora of lo-fi images on my screen could at times pander more credibly to my personal narrative than photographs I took myself, which could be heavily influenced or defined by applied photography, I started to lean into a practice free of those implications. Oil painting comes laden with its own meaning — not that I was relying on that alone, since I don’t paint photorealistically. Rather, I liked the playfulness and leeway in overstating certain tactile qualities of the image, prone to being lost in compression, while assimilating or simplifying other aspects. It allowed me to manipulate a photograph without changing its essence as I perceived it and gave me a new angle in how I saw and presented images where up till now I had been dependent on choices in editing.

A lot of the work I’d done prior to it had focused on monotypical visual catalogs (my used Starbucks cups, grimy purse paraphernalia accumulated over two years) all of which I can broadly describe as self-deprecating narratives of my consumer’s habits in the city — or, you don’t really know a person until you’ve sifted through their garbage. Now, however, I was starting to focus on individual images, and also those not made by me but tagged “found” and filed on my computer with other piquant images, which I suppose is another kind of hoarder’s habit. In any case, during the interval my working space metamorphosed from post-production and editing space to paint-covered studio, images that I “adopted” among others were: YouTube stills of ISIS militants blowing up an ancient tomb or what appear to be around thirty dogs repeatedly jumping in a pool — which I watched in the same sitting, having no idea how I got from one to the other — iPhone photos of American girls at prom “bombing” one another’s photos, police photos, editorial photos accompanying popular science articles, friends’ profile pictures and my own Instagram uploads, plucked out of a sea of lo-fi, fair use, vernacular images.

[caption id=”attachment_2849" align=”aligncenter” width=”474"]

Zeynep Beler, iPhone smuggler, 2015.[/caption]

Gradually, rather than photographing to find out what something would look like photographed, as Garry Winogrand famously said, I became aware of photographing to find out what something would look like painted. Most photographers should be able to identify with the haptic thrill at seeing professional art prints of one’s photographs, doubtless increased because most of us don’t get the chance — and the funds — to get them very often. I observed, while painting 10x10 cm canvases of my Instagram snapshots, that transposing the tiny images made of light (incidentally, our phone screens are Daguerreotype-sized) into a gleaming surface of paint was similarly satisfying. Instead of pursuing the “perfect” shot — indeed, my disillusionment with this aspect of photography may be the main culprit for my digression, because it’s a bit like chasing a carrot — I presently pursue images that translate to painting-mementos in the most perfect way.

[caption id=”attachment_2850" align=”aligncenter” width=”570"]

Zeynep Beler, Instagram #3, 2016.[/caption]

So I can never seem to venture far from my own photography, as decidedly downgraded as my equipment is now, while also still, at times, “adopting” found photographs. One point I make is indicating the origin of the image in the titles of my works, such as untitled (photobomb 1) or untitled (YouTube still). The titles can be considered footnotes or, in the welcome event that the viewer Googles them, manual links. It also brings around the issue of context full circle: the photographs, once again material, are also once again married to captions and dependent on them for full coherence.

Nicholson Baker advocates the practice of copying excerpts out of books “out of a desire to stay delight’s presence rather than autodidactic obligation” so the reader may mull over a passage in Zen-like meditation that “mere underlining [or] an efficient laptop retyping” does not offer. In this sense, on the rudimentary basis of entering a dialogue with the reader/viewer, visual representation is not unlike language. If receptive, we “read” photographs and they fascinate us, so simply put painting photographs may be my current effort to stay the otherwise short-lived presence of images from the collective consciousness, these days embodied by the Internet. (“Just don’t do it too much — “ advises Baker in closing, “and always use quotation marks.”)

Endnotes:

[1] Joan Fontcuberta, From Here On (2013), p. 130.

[2] Reena Jana, “Is It Art, or Memorex?”, Wired Magazine, March 21, 2001.

Edited by Özge Ersoy

Zeynep Beler received a BA in Graphic Design from Bilkent University and an MA in Photographic Studies from Leiden University. She lives and works in Istanbul. zeynepbeler.net

On Painting Photographs, Post-Internet was originally published in m-est on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.