#protocinema

“Don’t go into the mine, dad! You’ll kill us all!”

1910 magic lantern slides accompanying the song, “Don’t Go Down in the Mine, Dad” from Bamforth company, which made “Ladies Skirts Nailed to the Fence” ten years before (”inventing” the reverse shot).

Werner Nekes demonstrates the Lumières’ Kinora machine (1898). The flipping photo cylinder puts the operator in charge of the image’s flow, but the image is still of a singular bit of space-time, a lot like the processes used by Nekes to make the image and on the gif-software used to make these images.

This text has been published at M-est.org in October 2017 > https://m-est.org/2017/10/04/desiring-the-unconscious/

In this talk I want to have a look at how form and structure have been working in my productions in between 2009-2016, considering three solo shows; 5 Person Bufet, B.İ.M.A.B.K.R and Loyelow. I will discuss what’s what and how’s how instead of developing a narrative of metaphors and spells, or mesmerizing worlds of meaning and meaninglessness; but I do feel like I have been piercing into a sealed tin box through small holes for the past seven years and I too desire to see and reflect on the resulting form.

I will expose my thoughts in two main chapters. One of these two pillars focuses on the installations and sculptures I have conceived in gallery/museum spaces; the other on thoughts I have built within the space of text. The back and forth movements I make, and links I establish between text and object still constitute a field of discovery to me. So far, when asked about this relationship, I have stated my interest in the idea of work of art instead of the work itself. The times and places in which we live are too fragmented to understand a work of art in its totality, and in parallel to this temporal and spatial experience of life, instead of understanding objects and sentences, I am engaged in not understanding them; that my interest lies in the potential meanings/concepts and moments/spaces of emancipation that emerge within the new place/situation/phenomenon formed by the loss/slippage of meaning.

Let’s expound on these reflections.

In April 2009, I began writing texts that were erupting out of me, out of a need to get rid of the noises in my head, and the gloom I was feeling; texts I did not understand. I think this is the point where my bonds broke up with meaning I’d been searching for, until the age of 27.

What were the thoughts behind these texts?

How did the screams, snarls, stutters, obsessive repetitions and entangled voices of this complicated text, that I would arrange into 5 Person Bufet at the end of two years, gave birth to a table of boiling milk and two other exhibitions and books that would follow; Bicol, Manyel, Raziye, and Loyelow? I try to trace this thought in retrospect.

First of all I have to say that all three books – along with the accompanying objects and installations I exhibited – searched for associations between memory, unconscious and power structures within language, through the slips of the tongue. These experimental texts do not tend towards narrative, nor do they assume a literary role. Although they harbor poetic/narrative characteristics in their bodies, their upmost characteristic is that they’re engaged in shattering instead of constituting themselves. These are open texts; open not outwards but inwards. Inward openness is distinct from introversion. In inward openness, words and sounds strive to displace and seduce themselves as structures. Instead of dealing with the content or the narrative, they are interested in how fiction works. The quest for artistic form prevails over narrative. The appearances, images and vortexes they produce are potentially urgent and immediate. The text is not formed through additions but appears through excavations and cavities. These cavities often occur by erosion and reveal the traces of their process; or at times, like sculptures, they are subject to interventions of incision and hammering. Words, concepts, sounds, metaphors get entangled with themselves and each other, they become superposed, they surround a dead-end circle and like the torn ceilings of a wooden building, they form landslides within the text.

They do not aim at a target; they are not the witty discourse of any finding of any research of any project.

The complex structure here needs explanation. 5 Person Bufet, B.İ.M.A.B.K.R., and Loyelow is a series of successive productions. In 5 Person Bufet, voices are locked inside pieces of furniture through generic titles such as E1 (Man 1), K1 (Woman 1). These cabinets are one person rooms, out of which the voices apply forces of two kinds: force of sound in between the subjects, and physical force each subject applies against the furniture in a desire to break out. The bodies that echo these voices are a coffin, a safe, a vitrine, a door and a prison window cage. These objects-as-bodies are familiar to us through a common/a daily exposure of shared memory. Subjects of 5PB behold such bodies at an in-between; subjects are seeming units of transition that cannot break out of their cabinets nor break free from a totality veiled by the collective unconscious and memory; they are stuck in the symbolism of E1, K1., incapable of dissociating from the cacophony of voices hitting the furniture and thus resonating in a mixture of sounds. This ‘in between’ status does not yet correspond to a full selfhood. Likewise, this undissociated character is the first thing that jumps out at any person who steps into the 4th floor of Arter during July 2011. Although their sizes vary between 5 to10cm. from one and other, in their rosewood coated wooden bodies, the pieces of furniture appear at first sight aligned like soldiers. This is a homogenous structure. These bodies settle into space by wriggling out of the text’s voices however they do not reveal distinctively. Emre Baykal defines this in-between state as follows: “5 Person Bufet creates a space of experience where the claustrophobia of introvert, small spaces coexists with the agoraphobia of getting out, of overflowing oneself”  and an “inside and outside, which seem incapable of defeating each other.” The furniture’s interiors are empty, their doors half-open. They do not build a home but create an inward openness within the space.

Three of the subjects of 5PB that cannot be distinguished from each other find their names two years later within the text of B.İ.M.A.B.K.R.: Beyaz İlmekli Manyel, Albay Bicol, Kornatlı Raziye. These people are coded with the initials of their names; it is as if they were murdered or disaffiliated from the army… It doesn’t matter who they are.

The text snarls, squeals, stammers; talks in tongues and screams through the mouth of these three people. The chaotic sound world of 5PB, its indistinct subjects and embodied furnitures that resemble confession units start to become distinct. The desire of 5PB and its subjects to separate from its viscous body has begun. The mouth which speaks has gained in precision. But still these subjects can’t go beyond each being a mouth. The text is still a closed text and it is charged with codes. The sounds (such as KK), the words (such as Uçuk), the concepts (such as Sızı) emerge from the text, just like Alaaddin’s genie would emerge from a lamp. They become objects as stamps on shoe soles which were ripped from second hand women shoes, words on collars that are cut off of shirts, poems for rear view mirrors and gilded names for apartment buildings. Not only they become objects, they become memory and form by physically performing the act of ripping, tearing, displacing, dismantling etc. They reproduce typologies of the public life: A whiteness (a master) that never stains its hands, an officer (a mediator) that enforces power, a woman (a slave) that cleans the dirt… The forces of Beyaz İlmekli, Kornatlı, and Albay are so and so effective that they take over the exhibition space of Galeri Manâ three times over the course of a month-and-a-half exhibition. The signified space transforms three times. As these subjects cannot dissociate from one another and as they are connected with traces, paths, and shared memories, they eventually bounce off of each other and kickoff in the pages of the book as they do the same in the physical gallery space.

In the text of 5PB, the coffin is a coffin and the safe is a safe. These well defined phenomenons become fluid imageries in the text of B.İ.M.A.B.K.R. This fluidity brings the notion of displacement with it. Consequently, the objects of B.İ.M.A.B.K.R. realize a deterritorializing bond in the space. They are constantly chased out of the space in which they are installed. Kornatlı Raziye’s installation on the second floor of Galeri Manâ reminds/calls into memory a stacked house that is ready to move out at any moment.

The choices in materials and concepts are similar. Raziye’s vagina is a portrait on the wall of Manyel (Felt, 2013). The crypto titles of Bicol’s documents that are leaked become Manyel’s stitched names on collars (Collar, 2013), or stamped names on Raziye’s shoe soles (Sole, 2013). Bicol, placing mines on the border of homeland (Ammunition, 2013) and Raziye, who had her hymen stitched back (Virtue, 2013), are different territories of the concept of honour. The thin line of attached elastics with two razors on both ends climb high on the surface of a wall in Manyel’s territory (JITEM, 2013), whereas in Bicol’s territory they manifest a border crossing the earth on floor, attached this time to some door bolts (Ammunition, 2013). Beyaz İlmekli Manyel is a white man who likes shaving and he carries with him lots of elastics to stack the money in his pockets. Albay Bicol makes his elastic band a weapon and gives it a kick; the elastic gains momentum.

It is very common in B.İ.M.A.B.K.R. to handover, to deterritorize, to be permutated. The undistinguishable object bodies of 5PB are distributed in B.İ.M.A.B.K.R. To be more precise, 5PB is a body installed as a single piece across space, like a temple that is multiplied through its viewers. Where as B.İ.M.A.B.K.R.’s subjects are out of the box. They are in a state of becoming. They expose themselves to space, and take control as if they are memory machines. Albay Bicol’s KK in this sense is a machine that controls the space like a panopticon.

*

In Loyelow, new layers are added on top of these. In an unexpected way, language resolves its own mysterious, coded ways. We encounter a more transparent, more comprehensible text.

Having named itself, Loyelow is not a name in disguise. It doesn’t bear the the top-down hierarchy of capital-letters. It is no longer just a mouth within the flow of text, but it is a body; in circulation on the streets and in the city; a city, which reflects back on him with its imagery. Loyelow is no longer a dialect (mouth) that has been torn off of the body, but also an ear [14], also a gaze. It is a burning backbone [15], a crying self [16], a naked body that is carried on shoulders, and a corpse [17]. Loyelow, in contrast to its relatives, does not moan or hide, it listens and observes.

The text has no room to conceal its dirty tricks of a deep state that seized the text of B.İ.M.A.B.K.R. All those internalized personas of 5PB and B.İ.M.A.B.K.R. are ejected in this text. Eventually, collective unconscious stick onto Loyelow’s neckline through characters of Orhan, Veysel, Asım etc. as specters of caves, hills and tunnels that are surrounding him. Loyelow doesn’t intertwine with itself like E1 or K.R. does, but it intertwines with the city, wandering through wedding lounges that are built underground or walking around in cemeteries. Loyelow experiences the society and the city as dissociated from itself.

The objects of Loyelow do not present homogeneity in material or appearance like they do in 5PB and B.İ.M.A.B.K.R. The whiteness of the space in B.İ.M.A.B.K.R.’s first instalment, or the alignment, or the texture of the furniture in 5 Person Bufet, or evocations of memory such as white collars of the ruling class or the smell of boiling milk do not melt in the same pot. When one enters the space, the objects appear in vertical and horizontal axis that direct the eye from here to there. Measured from the ground, the hose is at 5 cm height, the neon lights are at 25 cm, the toy car at 10 cm, the tray at 15 cm, the sink at 70cm. The irregular winding of the hose oversees the depth of the space where as the tiles -as a reduced matrix- observe the verticality of the space. Together they form the spatial axis.

Loyelow’s embodiment of space is a heterogenous body. Neither the texture, the material, the color, the shape, nor the objects of a collective memory are forces that could influence each other anymore. Loyelow’s body is formed on the horizontal and vertical, in the field of impact between forces in different depths and heights. The idiosyncratic texture, color, and forms of the forces bounce the viewer’s gaze like a tennis ball.

It is also important to observe the object, independent of its subject at this point. I think my artistic practice between the years 2009 and 2016 has paved the way for these wannabe subjects to resolve themselves into selfhood in the study of objects. So the question is, how do we observe the object in these productions?

The memories of the unconscious or of the subjects that seep into the objects of 5PB and B.İ.M.A.B.K.R.and to Loyelow, although comprehensible through forms of knowledge of here and now, of this territory, and of this geography, yearn to dissociate themselves from their belongings: the window cage nailed to the white underwear elastic (E1, 2011), a TV screen turned on all day behind a translucent glass (FrostedGlass, 2011), a monumental vitrine (Vitrine, 2013), a shoe heel carrying a pin (Heel, 2013), a Tetris game made up of bathroom tiles (Cosmic Blue, 2016) or tea glasses filled with cooked rice (Ku, 2016). With their desirous textures, the layers they adapt from concept to material, their shifting boundaries and the synthesis they create are not representational.

Let’s look at it in detail.

The window cage that is nailed to E1 (2011) from a white underwear elastic is reminiscent of children who jump rope in the streets, using this elastic. Two hands that hold on to the prison fence -an image of a prisoner which we are accustomed to see, and which marks a territory in our collective conscience- is suggesting a tight white elastic which resonates. Similarly that’s how the game is played. The game is over if the child touches the rope while jumping. She loses and becomes an outcast. This conceptually ties us back to the prisoner in the cage. The prisoner has lost, and is an outcast. The moment E1’s voice from the text meets the vibrations of the underwear elastic, the window cage melts into space. The momentary imagination, the momentary black hole, the momentary swarm occurs physically. An interest in the idea of a work of art instead the work thus requires the dispersion or the organization of all these situations that can collide in space, both physical and textual, in synchrony, in fragments or in leaps as seen in this example.

Tea glasses filled with cooked rice each create a different cosmos by sweating on their own territory. We forget about the rice and we forget about the tea. The object takes on an amorphic, unfamiliar appearance. We are not able to recognize rice anymore, it becomes moldy. The tea glass attains selfhood through merging with rice. The tea glass sweats and becomes altered. In every detail begins the object’s self-determination, self-formation process. (Ku, 2016)

The table with a milk pool in its center is no longer recognizable as a table. As the milk boils, cream forms on its surface. A smell spreads out in the air. The cream becomes harder in texture and gains the appearance of marble, as an extension of the surrounding wood. The milk boils all day and evaporates. The plane which appears as the surface boundary of the table starts collapsing in insignificant alterations. At the end of the day, there is a void at the center of the table. The form perceived as the table caves in, the boundaries of the table shift. The table is altered. (Table, 2011)

The water in which the plaster-cast bucket fails to hold punctures the bottom of the bucket and starts leaking into the space. As the water detteritorize the plaster plane, the bucket’s process of becoming a bucket begins. It loses its function. Here, the object becomes shaped by the virtual presence of our memory of a bucket; it’s a puncture in the object-hood of a bucket. The object becomes fluid. It leaks out of its known meaning into meaninglessness. (Leak, 2013)

In this sense, the Young Prophet (2016) does this in reverse, through seizing its own becoming. Our memory calls the function of a hose to shape the flow of water. In the gallery space, it lies on the ground, filled with plaster. On close inspection, no intervention can be discerned. However, this is not just any hose, it is a hose and it is certainly not a representation of a hose. It evokes an intuition. What’s visible is the cross-sections of plaster at the two ends of the hose, and to see them, one has to stoop down. When one stoops down, there is a whole other dimension to observe the space. From Loyelow Fields to Ku to Cosmic Blue, Loyelow’s body is seen in a different scale. The presence of objects is disentangled from the gaze of subjects staring down, it is perceived in their own space-time.

“Time is a feature of the sensuality of objects themselves.” [18]

When an object is defined in relation to its subject or when it exists to fulfil a function, when it is enwrapped with the hegemony of memory and representation, our bodies also become objects through their exposure to subject and power relationships. What is proposed in these texts as the desire for object-bodies could be an effect of the intense relationalities they experience. This question has been directed at me for many years: What comes first, the object or the text? Does the text give birth to the object or does the object give birth to the text? This chicken-egg equation may not take us anywhere. However, we could argue that the refrains of the text, fatigued by repetition, end up folding the thought at some point and in folding, they propose the object. In this perspective, the formation of 5 Person Bufettook two years of writing only. Later on, the process became to be a spiral. The fermentation and sedimentation of thoughts…

I will end my talk with a small window onto this sedimentation, suggesting that the text, and the subject, and the material, and the sound are all objects.

In object oriented ontology, subject and object are not in a dichotomy. Here, the uncanny comes into play. Timothy Morton explains this with a simple example. When one travels, for the first few days, one’s way of experiencing oneself is gravely halted. One loses integrity and sense of normalcy, for instance when taking a shower, when plugging the phone’s charger, or as the surrounding smells are sharpened, and as the world of objects seems to break through the distance of normalcy and appear closer. In this context he asks: One’s world is perhaps the objects that are displaced? In a reverse reading, the sense of place is actually a sense of displacement.

The territories of 5PB and B.İ.M.A.B.K.R. are not accidental spaces in this context. They are unlike domestic interiors and yet they do not seem like any place we know. The world of objects we encounter as we step into the gallery space is already beyond the distance of the normal. On the other hand, this encounter brings about an intense feeling of place. This place is also seized through the temporality of the object. Like the time it takes milk to boil, like the interrupted time it takes water to flow inside the hose.

The examples can be added to. At this point, we could say that the objects at work both in texts and in installations, by engendering the sense of time and place, produce a consciousness in relation to one another, between what’s visible and what’s not, between what is present and what is absent: the emptiness/the void. This consciousness tells us that while imaginary subjects were in the process of searching their subject-hood, the true journey was in fact that of the objects becoming. In this perspective, we might suggest that the subject’s emancipation towards selfhood depends on the simultaneous liberation of the object from the subject.

To abandon function, to contemplate the permeability and the flexibility of boundaries, to form a different relationship with time and to observe what happens in the moment, to become time, even, to lend an ear to repetitions and wears, to speculate that we could be an object and to imagine how a coffin would behave had it not this rosewood coated body, etc., etc.,