Istanbul Rountrip III
This is the third exhibition in the series of "Roundtrip Istanbul", which aim to look into the life, work, sensitivity, consciousness and passions of the immigrant artist. The immigrant artist occasionally or frequently comes back to his/her home-country creating a vacuum during his/her absence and a nimbus during his/her emergence. One of the most substantial objectives of this investigation was to capture the climax of transformation in the work of the artist during the periods of absence or emergence. Thus, these exhibitions were born out of my curiosity which wanted to transmit to audiences. My position as a curator was fixed; I could only receive information and estimate their position in the immigrant condition. Here, one must consider that the immigrant condition is being defined from the position of a settled person. The settled people can only presuppose the experiences of this condition by comparing the conditions of settlement to immigration, of sitting to moving, of engagement to disengagement, of property to liberty, of leisure to strain, of convenience to danger. For the settled one the flux of information means change, permutation, novelty .The immigrant having acquired the ability to processing the waves of chaotic information, at the same time having acquired the ability of survival, is conspicuously creative. The information and change brought by the immigrant may create a turbulence in the life of the inhabitants. These exhibitions are supposed to serve this purpose; that is to exploit the tranquil position of the settled.
I played my role as a settled curator and built my dialogue with these artists through e-mail.
The project of Barbara and Zafer Baran consists of two parts. One of these is work done in the studio, and one work done in the field. The field work is rooted in their personal black-and-white documentary work and is focused on the simplest of natural elements: rocks and stones. These photographs are a kind of tribute to some cultures and civilisations that have paid respect to ancient rocks and even worshipped them. The studio work is more subjective. It is based on the rocks and stones the artists have collected on their documentary 'expeditions' to historical regions. These are the raw materials present in and around these sites and have the same age as the stones shaped by past cultures. The images they have produced on the basis of these small objects have the feel of X-rays, or sketches. In the process of being photographed the stones are transformed and decontextualised, and therefore perhaps become less tied to the present, more suggestive of a general flow of time. The title of each photograph has a code based on location and date. Previous black-and-white documentary projects include a series based on the post-Industrial Revolution landscape of Yorkshire, with its ruined mills and factories; and various projects in Turkey documenting human traces both old and new. A large series entitled Turkish Portraits was exhibited at the Photographers' Gallery, London, in the late 1980s. This depicted people from various regions and-like the stones-portrayed the subjects clearly as individuals rooted in their own time and space, with clues to their histories around them.
This is an intricate work of collecting and displaying "memory'' and of going into the roots of "landscape''. Ambiguously it is dealing with perpetuity, continuation, eternity which are conditions of "settlement'' as opposed to mobility and shifting. Nature, here in the form of integral parts of landscape, indicates everything outside of the city , where the human movement is dramatically staged.
Nature shifts into the scene as the desirable common territory for moving and unmoving.
With her piece, called Nothing to Declare, Canan Tolon turns the gallery entrance into a flying-carpet store. Carpets, frozen in their flights, hover above the heads of the visitors, each carrying patches of live green grass. These ''cultivated'' landscapes are out of reach, as tokens of a promised no man's land, and will be left to die slowly in the course of the exhibition. Her aim is not only to make references to the selling-out of culture through cheapened replicas but also to make allusion to a place people imagine, and try to reach, in vain, where it is always greener than their neighbors'. In this piece the natural and the artificial are in conflict, and illustrate the clash between reality and imagination. The orient is demystified, scrutinized and left in the hands of those who chose to culturally enslave and self-orientalize with the hope of profiting from that folklore vision. Cultural and material exchange is implicated in parallel with territorial claims and the on going brain-drain. Borders are made more accessible when one has ''nothing to declare''. To stress the unnecessary difficulties some, more than others, encounter while going through borders, she intends to leave barriers standing chaotically in the middle of the gallery. They are dividers that further complicate access they force people into getting in a line and into doing what is required, in exchange for some consideration.
In this installation the conditions of human existence in the universal goal toward ever higher standards of living and greater economic power are examined through the models of standardized dreams and tools of restriction. The grass representing natural resources is displayed as a passive and diminishing agent within this march of accelerated progress. It aims to make people conscious about the responsibility for the direction, the pace and the obscure success of this march.
The work of Ipek Duben entitled The Book of Love is a piece consisting of a 50 page steel book and its presentation table in steel. The book contains the recordings of 100 cases of domestic violence and abuse which she collected from Turkish and American newspapers over a period of three years. I was deeply moved by the stories of the victims and the killers from different cultures and races whose love, fear, greed and despair had found expression in anger, hatred and revenge regardless of gender difference. Some killed, others shamed their loved ones or those they envied. The gap between reality and dreams was too great for them, it is less for others. In between there is a lot that people share; the right to live and the shame of transgression. The original texts of the 100 cases are hand-printed on the steel plates. In most cases the visual presentation of the text and image are manipulated in the processor both copying and printing. In each case the content of the text is kept intact. The rust on the steel and the original color of the newspaper are preserved.
This installation is deeply involved with the life of ordinary people. Duben asserts her position as an artist by looking at, observing and describing in detail the historiography of the nameless victims/criminals of economically, politically and culturally different modem/post-modem societies as juxtaposed in Turkey and the USA, and discloses remarkable analogies. This work strongly relates to the ideas of Michel Foucault: ''This turning of real lives into writing is no longer a procedure of heroization it functions as a procedure of objectification and subjection.'' (*)
Beral Madra
*Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, Vintage Books, 1995, p.192
I played my role as a settled curator and built my dialogue with these artists through e-mail.
The project of Barbara and Zafer Baran consists of two parts. One of these is work done in the studio, and one work done in the field. The field work is rooted in their personal black-and-white documentary work and is focused on the simplest of natural elements: rocks and stones. These photographs are a kind of tribute to some cultures and civilisations that have paid respect to ancient rocks and even worshipped them. The studio work is more subjective. It is based on the rocks and stones the artists have collected on their documentary 'expeditions' to historical regions. These are the raw materials present in and around these sites and have the same age as the stones shaped by past cultures. The images they have produced on the basis of these small objects have the feel of X-rays, or sketches. In the process of being photographed the stones are transformed and decontextualised, and therefore perhaps become less tied to the present, more suggestive of a general flow of time. The title of each photograph has a code based on location and date. Previous black-and-white documentary projects include a series based on the post-Industrial Revolution landscape of Yorkshire, with its ruined mills and factories; and various projects in Turkey documenting human traces both old and new. A large series entitled Turkish Portraits was exhibited at the Photographers' Gallery, London, in the late 1980s. This depicted people from various regions and-like the stones-portrayed the subjects clearly as individuals rooted in their own time and space, with clues to their histories around them.
This is an intricate work of collecting and displaying "memory'' and of going into the roots of "landscape''. Ambiguously it is dealing with perpetuity, continuation, eternity which are conditions of "settlement'' as opposed to mobility and shifting. Nature, here in the form of integral parts of landscape, indicates everything outside of the city , where the human movement is dramatically staged.
Nature shifts into the scene as the desirable common territory for moving and unmoving.
With her piece, called Nothing to Declare, Canan Tolon turns the gallery entrance into a flying-carpet store. Carpets, frozen in their flights, hover above the heads of the visitors, each carrying patches of live green grass. These ''cultivated'' landscapes are out of reach, as tokens of a promised no man's land, and will be left to die slowly in the course of the exhibition. Her aim is not only to make references to the selling-out of culture through cheapened replicas but also to make allusion to a place people imagine, and try to reach, in vain, where it is always greener than their neighbors'. In this piece the natural and the artificial are in conflict, and illustrate the clash between reality and imagination. The orient is demystified, scrutinized and left in the hands of those who chose to culturally enslave and self-orientalize with the hope of profiting from that folklore vision. Cultural and material exchange is implicated in parallel with territorial claims and the on going brain-drain. Borders are made more accessible when one has ''nothing to declare''. To stress the unnecessary difficulties some, more than others, encounter while going through borders, she intends to leave barriers standing chaotically in the middle of the gallery. They are dividers that further complicate access they force people into getting in a line and into doing what is required, in exchange for some consideration.
In this installation the conditions of human existence in the universal goal toward ever higher standards of living and greater economic power are examined through the models of standardized dreams and tools of restriction. The grass representing natural resources is displayed as a passive and diminishing agent within this march of accelerated progress. It aims to make people conscious about the responsibility for the direction, the pace and the obscure success of this march.
The work of Ipek Duben entitled The Book of Love is a piece consisting of a 50 page steel book and its presentation table in steel. The book contains the recordings of 100 cases of domestic violence and abuse which she collected from Turkish and American newspapers over a period of three years. I was deeply moved by the stories of the victims and the killers from different cultures and races whose love, fear, greed and despair had found expression in anger, hatred and revenge regardless of gender difference. Some killed, others shamed their loved ones or those they envied. The gap between reality and dreams was too great for them, it is less for others. In between there is a lot that people share; the right to live and the shame of transgression. The original texts of the 100 cases are hand-printed on the steel plates. In most cases the visual presentation of the text and image are manipulated in the processor both copying and printing. In each case the content of the text is kept intact. The rust on the steel and the original color of the newspaper are preserved.
This installation is deeply involved with the life of ordinary people. Duben asserts her position as an artist by looking at, observing and describing in detail the historiography of the nameless victims/criminals of economically, politically and culturally different modem/post-modem societies as juxtaposed in Turkey and the USA, and discloses remarkable analogies. This work strongly relates to the ideas of Michel Foucault: ''This turning of real lives into writing is no longer a procedure of heroization it functions as a procedure of objectification and subjection.'' (*)
Beral Madra
*Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, Vintage Books, 1995, p.192
