New Citizen In the postcards that I collected from Paris and Istanbul, I gave the possibility of existence to the girls captured in the patterns and they told their own stories. To insert “New Citizen” into Europe with its new historical associations, allowed for an expression that pushes the limits of tradition of European representation. As a way to transcend representation, I borrowed strategic sources from wall papers and Turkish tiles, which became tools of deconstruction that will work from within the patterns. Colonial images, which have been relatively excluded from art history –monkeys running around in joy, Chinese women involved in a tea ceremony– found a place for themselves, multiplied infinitely with the surfaces they occupy and became part of collective memory with the atmosphere they have created. This ornamental transformation of the “Other” is the result of a decorative reconciliation. Without realizing, they affect our gaze and transform it. Contrary to intentional gaze, we don’t look at wallpapers; they surround us as objects of involuntary unintentional gaze... Wallpapers -besides hosting heavy oil paintings and reflecting the house owner’s elite taste- and tiles are a realm of uncanny images that are accumulating towards the unconscious beyond a mystical atmosphere. I have performed interventions on the postcard, which I found at a museum foyer in Paris, to reveal the desire arrested in the images of the Chinese woman and the boy. The Chinese woman is surprised by the sudden appearance of her phallus and the boy becomes a narcissist against Europe’s Islamophobia; covered and caressing himself. Knowledge that is colonial, oriental or produced through any other ideological discourse does not only create the other but also transforms it into an image. To save ‘difference’ that cannot be rehabilitated or tamed from these discourses, I bestowed them with their own gestures. The Çintemani pattern, which is often used as a touristic image of Turkey, has been removed from its own surface and circulates as a cultural representation. The violence inherent in this pattern, which is a populist reflection of cultural consumption, released the possibility of resistance in the dizzying and angry actions of the girls. To create a space of existence for the New Citizen, I freed it from the imposed definitions and from the world of narrow meanings of all ideological gazes. To reflect on the cultural differences that are suppressed and left outside of the political borders of Europe, hiding in the innocent patterns of the ornament, I entitled them to the right to move. These timeless frozen images are freed with the possibilities of video technology. 2009 Translation: Ýz Öztat ............................................................................................................................................................ Europe as a Parliament The accession of Turkey to the EU has added a new dimension to the way many political concepts are addressed and it made Europe undergo a change while conceptualizing its own transformation process. In this way, it has also triggered a series of crisis which revealed the hidden paradigms of Europe. While Europe frames its political borders through those excluded and included in the EU parliament, it inevitably becomes obliged to confront with the “Europe” which is defined as an imaginary/mythical space of law. As a result of these discussions, I had a conception of ‘Europe and us’ as a complex polymorphous entity which is intermingled rather than consisting of two poles and I happened to end up in France. Throughout the three-month residency in Vitry-sur-Seine which hosted the living evidence of the hypocrite policies that send the immigrants to Citée’s outside Paris, I realized that I was in the right place for the “Parliament” project which was politically clear but had a certain mystery. When I positioned myself somewhere outside the political map but to a place I felt I culturally belonged, Europe turned into a scene stuck between a utopic space and a parliament. Leaving the clichés aside, I wanted to investigate this culture sneaking into my complexion through the body of the Refugee which I temporarily placed myself in and I discovered that our common problem was the struggle to recapture our ‘Bare Life’. The imaginary ‘New Citizen’ which I problematized through refugees at Musée MAC/VAL Vitry gradually became more spatialized and focused on the EU Parliament Building in Strasbourg. The building is, at the same time, a sign of the mental and cultural unity of Europe as well as is an architectural monument which has received appreciation as a utopic space. As declared by the competition jury, it fully complies with the criteria. For me, the architectural features and the concerning declarations are quite significant. In terms of an architectural analysis, this building presents the formal synthesis of the European myths, symbols and allegories reflecting Babylon as a European idea. As a space of idea inspired by Babylon, it looks as if it is striving for eternity by chucking out the past and present with its multilingual, timeless and prefect order. In such a state, the building became a space for me to construct a work on ‘getting existence to speak’. My purpose is not only to reflect my feelings which oscillate between envy and gratitude aroused by the European Union Parliament building and its associations, but also to problematize this encounter within a dimension of space and time in which Europe questions its values through its refugee policies. The suspended lives queuing at the EU gate came together in ‘Camp’. Camp: Agamben defines camp as; “a zone of indistinction between the outside and the inside, the exception and the rule, the licit and the illicit, in which every juridical protection had disappeared…” “If the refugee represents such a disquieting element in the order of the nation-state, this is above all because by breaking the continuity between man and citizen, nativity and nationality, they put the originary fiction of modern sovereignty in crisis.” “The political system no longer orders forms of life and juridical rules in a determinate space but instead containsat its very center a dislocating localization that exceeds it and into which every form of life and every rule can be virtually taken.” ‘Parliament’ is staged in a ‘camp’ within the architectural plan of the EU Parliament building which is a reduced drawing. Those who are perplexed and therefore defeated by ‘the relationship between the violence enacting laws and the violence protecting these laws’, the materialized broken allegories of Europe, muses who have missed their ways, animal-women, silver men, those who have committed suicide, betrayers, charlatans, libertines, lost girls, animal-citizens, those eating themselves, those taken out from the sea, those digging the earth with their teeth, those taking hostage of their own bodies and the other uncanny are preparing their own games within the ambiguous district between exclusion and inclusion. June 2010 ............................................................................................................................................................ New Citizen I have always been amazed at the simultaneous presence of the contradictory winds in the world. The cultural diversity of those who settled here will necessitate a search for a different kind of politics in the end. As spaces for cultural encounters, squares and streets could be inspiring for new life forms I’m juxtaposing my patterns with the dominant heroes, symbols, allegories and icons of art history that were imported and used in the Westernization movement which became subject to many ironic stories in my own culture and education. Adornment which belongs to the underdeveloped societies of art and its decorative field turns into the possibility of an alternative language for me. I tried to handle the consumption images of our day by sometimes mocking myself through the comic situations caused by differences and sometimes assigning roles to the ghosts and heroes of the past. And by sending the images back to where they came from, to the billboards of Vitry, I wanted to share it with everyone. 2009 ............................................................................................................................................................ Between Space and History, Harem 2008 ............................................................................................................................................................ BROKEN ALLEGORI Is it possible to liberate the woman figure invaded by art history? While pursuing the answer to this question, it was inevitable for me to question the act of painting. I brought together my subjective gestures with the images I detached and stole away from their sources and symbolic systems. The slippery surface of computer offered me an infinite opportunity for arranging these meetings. I wanted to create intervals in this system that bothers me and which makes me feel that I do not belong by dispatching the parts of my body to new surfaces with the help of a new vocabulary I constructed. While I was dealing with numerous sources and patterns for "Broken Alegori" in my studio, the following ideas accompanied my production process; in a world where grand narratives, heroes and myths have become extinct, images can only exist temporarily within their shadow. It is impossible to create a new image but it is possible to meet focuses develop with each other. These fragments are far from having a narrative with unity and are merely a deviant reflection of the visual narratives they once belonged to. The tension of these word-images I randomly place on the surface makes visible the desire suppressed by art history. The authority hidden in fantasies reconstruct their temporary presence on the surface as a disappointment by the cut in the infinite cycle among images. 2008 ............................................................................................................................................................ Guide for girls escaping from home "Guide for girls escaping from home" is a collection of images and signs derived from various sources used as a vocabulary for warning girls towards dangers; advising them for overcoming difficult situations and proposing strategies for survival. It is a wall application for devising protection of possible traps. These patterns collected and stolen are fugitives for representation, therefore outsiders of modernism. They are photographic images, press covers, images of girls who are acquaintance, my dreams, others? dreams, signs of a city, all kinds of ideograms and pictograms, amblems of militarizm, symbols and illustrations. Beside all these I will replace myself as a story teller and a reminder inside the arrangement and aiming to move as a virus in the architecture. The moral (töre) murders which are the subjects of many academic and social research ask for immediate political precautions. This is clearly a social responsibility, yet my concern here is to find the girls inside and under these different levels of meaning before it has become a headline, a topic. It is almost impossible to breath and move inside the language system we are in. The search in our visible world and presentational capacity of art is a very fertile field which has provided us with numerous images and meanings since this day. Art as deciphering codes filters into its own bulk and brings new moves in our consciense (mind). Visual images surround us hunger for fluidity of pre-language time to open up new meanings. Inscription and image is in a constant endeavour for regaining its pozition before presentation. In order to filter myself as a defeatist inside this tension, the web of indications and meanings; it is only possible with mangling the sentence, fusing, melting and bursting it. All kinds of signs have to be converted into growling and whispering. My aim is to surface the official discourses filtered through the modern woman?s womb, intestines which seem natural.Images come from the western representation of other return their original raw condition before the memorization. They change shapes with this jolt, invade the space, multiply and become prevalent. The multiplication of minorities and emigrants by reproduction is not only Europe?s paranoia, it is also the paranoia of national identity. I aim to collect the images left behind of girls escaping from home by applying story teller?s methodology. Transforming them into patterns for exercising the restrenghtening of memory. Collecting the traces that are left behind by the girls traveling in different cultures; in newspapers, press covers, scientific research papers, cities. All these recollected images turn into signs in a different dictionary and placed in architectural field. The opening partway of mass vision constructed by visual and written media and discourses; and appearing of personal stories? Using the slippery surface of computer environment as a catalizor, I play with the world?s bitter and violent experience until it is distanced. The residues; folios, patterns, lines, animations become viruses smudged into walls and multiply into life itself. 2007 ............................................................................................................................................................ From
"Ghost Line" Playing with line, I imagine myself like one of those old-time storytellers ? a storyteller, however, who can not control the story and, is eventually swallowed by the story. I feel for directness between my body and its extremities as well as the family romance and psychic shadows that fall upon it. These are not pictures but a conspiracy that the body has entered into with line ? a fugitive, escaping the centuries ? long Western hegemony of the paint(ing) and its alleged owner, the drawer. Thus, just like every effort to convey an experience to others, every attempt to control and possess line turns out to be an impossible desire for it reminds line the captivity it has suffered under the paint(ing). Free of any historical encumbrance, it refuses to belong on the surface of paper, turning it into a void. Line is self-imposing yet betrays,cheats, and ridicules its owner. It steals from me. Ultimately everything that has ever been on paper reaches towards a story, which becomes not mine but line's own story. 2004 From "nowhere-body-here" I'm looking for a place; I imagine a place, a place that dusky throngs that gush like weeds from the pavement and fill the cracks have secretly created with their own hands. I think in images. They multiply in masses and occupy the city. They frighten and shame the streets and our homes. The city is a gigantic dead insect. Children are its concealed organs. Thousands of hands and feet scurrying like an army of ants bear the body from street to street. The city reveals itself to me like an imaginary indicator.
We began shooting
in Esentepe with a group of sixteen. The albinos of course were already
there. The children thronging around as take their
places as new figures on the stage. Because of the movement of the sun
we have to work fast: the pace of work makes me feel as if I had been
taken captive by the children and from time to time control passes them.
The light reflected by the albinos?bodies is absorbed by those of the
dark-skinned girls. The setting in which games are being played out somewhere
between the staging of a tragedy and the tecniques of survival. So many images have been produced in the field of art that it is very difficult to produce a new one. With the divorce of appearance and existence, the space between reality and image has become rumpled. For every images that we encounter, there is another imagethat mimics it. An image protects the problematic relationship between itself and reality within its own past and the strata of it. Ýmage technologies are on the point of bringing into being a closed system incorporating both photography and painting. And they are creating a platform for those who have lost their awareness of transforming the world. I am trying to reach the misery of my own geography through reality shows, the performans of charitable institutions, psychodramas, and the mangled bodies of women, men, and children that have been the object of exploitation by ideology of whatever sort. And I set about this task by excavating every sort of imaginal structure that alienates us from our own misery. 2000 ............................................................................................................................................................ Skinless I spoke of development plans. Tried to seduce it with the benefits of progress. It wore the hide I handed, and this time wrote its yearnings on the hide, deepening with disappointments. And now, I was even more naked, because I was void of all consolation to fill the emptiness between the skin and the hide, and I expanded and spilled over to spaces. These spaces were glutted with unfulfilled promises. The space of the alien in me; displacing my body, turning my house to a ruin and collapsing my kinship to the world. Now, I heard about the construction of a pool somewhere in the world to collect the waters of all streams. Will my and your aliens stream towards this pool? Will the skin, the hide and the body ever meet again? Or do we have to learn to live skinless? 1998 Look here! June 1998 ............................................................................................................................................................ Hold She cut her feet so that 1997 ............................................................................................................................................................ The
spirit can't be contained by the body! The work is neither as I imagined
it, nor does it surrender to its own materrial existence. This tension
persists; and form seeks to make up for its own inadequacy by multiplying
the feelings of others. I believe that a work will endure to the extent
that it is freed from its creator. What I want is to excite a feeling
left over from the work's life, and to see it go out to stimulate other
feelings and spawn them. I draw, and have been drawing so long that the act is an extension of my body and the womb of all my work. If only desire could be made so simple. A pencil and a piece of paper, is all we need. ............................................................................................................................................................ If I could fall into
the paper Our bodies used to be transparent Naughty watercolour These are stolen These reds these blues Tear up the paper! Reach out to me If I could fall into the paper The way you look at me has changed ............................................................................................................................................................ |