other blogs by koken ergun
Interview with Köken Ergun, questions from Petra Heck sent by e-mail on May 5, 2009PH – To start talking about your work, I want to focus on the most recent piece in this presentation: TANKLOVE. You made this video-performance during a residency at S.A.I.R in Denmark, and it shows a tank entering the provincial village of Jyderup. Could you elaborate on making this piece, and concentrate on how it differs from the other two pieces shown here, The Flag and Untitled, which, I believe, were both made in Turkey. How long did you stay in Denmark, for instance, and how did the process of making this go?
KE – I was commissioned by the U-TURN Quadrennial to make a new piece. I first had the idea of a tank penetrating a house through the window. It was a funny image, also erotic. Then it would interact with the people of the town in different ways. While these images were going around in my head, I was reminded of the military coups in Turkey, none of which I witnessed cause they ceased to happen after 1980, or took different shapes. But I do remember the Sincan incident of 1997.
At that time there was a religious party leading the right wing coalition, and the army (the so-called guarantor of the secular regime) was of course disturbed by this, as they often can't stand the democratically elected parties – if they happen to be right wing. (The left in Turkey is totalitarian, republican, bourgeois, xenophobic and anti-European Union, etc.) Sincan is a small city very close to the capital, Ankara. Its mayor, then from the religious right, organized one of the common 'Jerusalem night' performances in the town.
Jerusalem night performances were initiated by Khomeini of Iran as an annual commemoration for resistance against Israel, with the aim of freeing Jerusalem from the Jewish state. These nights are composed of several performative acts, sometimes acted out by children. So when these images appeared on TV, you can imagine that the hair stood up on the back of the necks of the secular republicans... Anyway, so the Turkish army general ordered the army commander of that region to make a show of force. So one morning, unexpectedly, a large group of tanks appeared on the streets of Sincan, rumbling down the main street, shaking the earth. ('Waking up to the sounds of tanks' has been a common phrase among the generations who witnessed the coups of the 1960s, '70s and '80s.) A funny story is this: the second best-selling newspaper of Turkey, was 'whispered to' that something was going to happen in that town, so they sent two reporters there. They are able to catch the parade of tanks, and after taking pictures they quickly set off to Ankara, for the deadline of the evening paper. The best-selling newspaper heard about this, and got jealous. The boss of this newspaper calls the army general and asks him to repeat the parade in the afternoon so that his crew can also take pictures. So the tanks go back once more on the main street...Imagine the citizens of Sincan; like watching a tennis game. I always found the whole thing very performative; even more: theatrical.
Shortly after this tank performance, the army forced the government to resign. Since then this episode has been referred as the 'post-modern coup'.
So my ideas slowly moved from a fictional film to a more performative act. I decided to get a tank and run it down the streets of a small Danish town without advance warning. It was my aim to recreate what happened in Turkey back in 1997. The reason I chose Denmark was to ask the question, 'What if it happens to them one day?' This is the welfare state that is so proud of its democracy. Military or other totalitarian fractions are hardly visible, and powerless. I wanted to ask if one day this could change. And further than this, to pose the simple question, 'What do you do when you see a tank?'
Over a period of two months I developed the piece with the help of the Jyderup public and many Danish institutions, including the Danish army. Since I stayed in the town and lived with the locals, in that time we developed a close friendship. The Danish army was very helpful too, but they simply didn't have enough tanks in the country to give one to us. So we rented the tank from a private collector. The whole process was demanding, especially the fact that the tank would damage the asphalt. But the regional council had no problem with that, because the whole project had the full support of the Jyderup community in the first place. So it is not my work actually, it's theirs. They collaborated with me to bring this tank to their town. This project probably could not have happened in any other country.
PH – You told me this is not simply a finished piece. Can you say more about that? There is a blog you made for this piece, but you do that for other pieces too. What is the difference with this one? And also, why do you use the format of blogs at all for your work. Is it to create more dialogue and discussion around your work?
KE – i think it is more like something which cannot be made into a piece, into an artwork. You see, the TANKLOVE project changed over time. Something that started as fiction was welded to reality during the process. This was therefore a turning point in my practice. With this project I simply realized that fiction is not my thing. For me the highlight of the project was how the town's people interacted with the tank in their own streets. It is a small town, people own the streets, not like the other way around, as it is in big cities. So many things happened that you don't see in this film. The tank was there for the whole day. There were several fictional scenes we shot but never used in the end. While these scenes were being shot there were other TV crews, journalists who came to document this unusual event; and the town's people, especially the children, had lots of fun with the tank. They were able to climb on top of it, pose for the cameras in front of it. It was like a circus that came to town. Then in the afternoon, when we drove the tank down the main street, in front of the railway station and all the markets and shops, it caught many people by surprise. They didn't understand why a tank was driving up their main street. With the help of the Danish army's volunteer groups, the Home Guard, we were able to keep traffic running on the main street, so the cars were passing next to the tank. And then we decided to give the town a show that they will always remember. We played with the tank's smoke machine, creating a spectacle of smoke and also loud engine noise for about 20 minutes. The trains were arriving and departing at the station. Passengers getting off the train, on their way home, witnessed a giant machine blowing out smoke toward the façade of the municipal building. Like a dragon... In the end, the locals started calling me Santa Claus, and they wanted me to come every year. It was a remarkable experience for me.
So, no film can really represent this energy, this experience. That is why I want to make a book of this project, with interviews with the locals, the people who helped us, like the home guard, or the town council, how they all saw this action, and with several photos we took during the making of the film. It created a lot of discussion in Denmark as well. So I want to revisit these discussions. But I haven't been able to find the necessary funds to make this book yet. So I started a blog for the project. It is acting like a model for the book.
This blog was the inspiration for other blogs about my other works. I always felt uneasy about leaving a work to itself after completing it. Exhibitions were not enough. Not all the things you want to say end up in the film – the final product. So these blogs helped me to confirm my need to reflect on my projects. I don't only have blogs for finished works, but also for doing my research about new projects. Like this 'instructions and rules' blog: it's about a new project I have in mind about acting, my roots. And then I will open a blog about the effects of Turkish TV soaps on the Palestinian society. If you do this, in the end, the premiere or launch of the work, as it is in openings of exhibitions, becomes unimportant, both for yourself and for the audience. I think it also helps to take away some of the 'opening night' stress on the artist. I come from a theater background, and one of the reasons I left theater was because I hated that stress of the performance night. I think I am doing what I am doing now because of all these fears I had in the past. Therefore, I don't like to give myself similar “performance stress” like deadlines, commissions and openings. I can even say that making fiction is stressful, because in order to make fiction you need to rule over nature, to pause it, or to change it. This is my background actually, I mean theater. But now I am looking to represent nature as it is, not trying to reconstruct it for my comfort, or the audience's.
In general I think the end product should not be so important, and the presentation should not be the only channel for showing your work, your worries, your happiness or whatever you are putting out there. For example, there is this thing which is very common in Berlin: they call it finissage. They celebrate the end of their exhibition. I never understood it. How can artists celebrate the end of their exhibitions? Are they happy that it has ended? Or are they feeling relieved that a responsibility is off of their shoulders? I don't think an exhibition should ever end. I want to carry it with me all the time. This is why I am very slow in producing new works. It's like how you cannot get over an ex-lover. Why should you? We have a small video collective, with seven other video artists called AFAVA. Some of our members think the same about producing slow and little. I am very lucky to be able to share this with them. After all, there is a system out there which demands you to produce more and more.
PH - You are living and working in Berlin now. How long have you been there, and did going there change your way of working, your perception and the subject of your work? Did it affect you a lot moving to Berlin – or actually, moving out of Turkey – since you lived in London and New York before too, and Berlin is not your first move out of Turkey?
KE – I've been based in Berlin since 2007. Immediately after arriving to Germany – it was for a residency at the Künstlerhaus Worpswede – I decided to take the German-Turkish community as my next subject. I entered the community and lived with them for some time, before deciding which part of their life/culture to focus on, and I made the 3-channel video work, WEDDING, over the period of two years. So I think the projects I do abroad are somehow linked to home. As I pointed out above, TANKLOVE is also about Turkey. I guess you can carry your way of working, your perception, from one place to another. I am planning to develop my new pieces in the Middle East, namely Palestine, Lebanon and Israel.
PH – About your split-screen installation “The Flag”. I want to ask you why you chose the split screen, and whether you can then also say a word about your working methods in this particular work? For instance, did you ask for permission to shoot at the April 23 Children’s Day Celebrations, which mark the establishment of the new Turkish Parliament, and hence the official demise of the Ottoman Empire back in 1920?
KE – I frequently get asked that. I have been wondering why that is. I think the audience is under the impression – I must somehow be conveying that – that this ceremony is closed – a 'closed crowd', if we would use Elias Canetti's terms – but it is not. It is a public event. So it is definitely possible to record it. I might have gone a bit nearer to the subjects than anyone else would do, that is true. But I could see that the subjects I shot were happy about it. They want more and more people to see their performance.
You see, what is happening there is a ritual, and rituals construct the cultural codes we live with. It is not the cultural codes that create the rituals. In other words, rituals create myths, not the other way around. And rituals are obligatory. Myths, like religion are at the discretion of its worshipers. Therefore the state supports rituals of this kind and makes them obligatory for its citizens, by way of making these days holidays, like the Queen's Day you have in the Netherlands, or the Turkish Childrens Day we see here. On these holidays there are demonstrations, parades, performances, stuff that 'reminds' you of your state and your citizenship. In Emile Durkheim's terms, this is 'ritual time', where the effervescence of the ritual allows the individual to feel and move as part of a community. However, as soon the celebrations are over, or the national day has ended, the citizen regains his or her individual status, gets out of the community spirit. This is why the state repeats these rituals every year, because it wants to prolong this feeling of unity, so that you always remain a good citizen, part of the community, which must feel together, move together.... To remind us, and to get us back to the community mode at every ritual time. It is this community mode that can create the strongest energy: the energy of the masses. It is capable of creating the biggest wars. And it did. Think of the crusaders, or how the Third Reich managed the masses. However, there are always ways to escape this power too, or not to be part of it. For example, what happened on your Queen's Day this year was remarkable. An individual refused to give in to the effervescent power of the ritual, and the state. He reacted against it, by crashing his car into the crowd which was the community he didn't participate in, and was opposing.
As for the use of two screens: I have been very influenced by the work of Eija Liisa Ahtila. I think she is one of the reasons that I started making videos. While working in theater, with Robert Wilson, I saw the world more as three dimensional, live. But then I saw a work by Ahtila, 'The House', and I was so impressed by it. Then I became interested in the two dimensional world of film. But if you allow the audience to look at one subject from two or three different points of view at the same time, you can get closer to the three dimensional. Maybe this is why I like using multi-screens. For example, my last work, WEDDING, is three screens. But even better, the cubists did this on a single canvas. But best of all: life is three-dimensional, without making any extra effort, with no artificial push. This becomes the main question once again: how to represent life so it looks like life? Or do you construct a completely new life?
PH - I read somewhere you see “The Flag” as an act of exorcism of your fear about the rising nationalism in the world, but especially in Europe. Would you comment on this rising nationalism you see in relation to “The Flag” and you relation to rituals? I also read in an interview something about the strategy of “national education”. Can you tell me more about this strategy and its relation to your work?
KE - Yes, I think nationalism is the biggest headache for mankind now. It has been created in Europe. One cannot help thinking that only 100 years ago there was nothing like nationalism, because it was still the time of multi-cultural states or empires. Then it grew like a bacteria and from Europe it contaminated the entire world. For example, I am watching the semi-finals of the Eurovision Song Contest as I am answering your questions. And it is so ridiculous how they are pushing 'nations' and nationalism with lame contests like this. It is extremely ironic that it is taking place in Russia this year, one of the older and stronger states of the east, which did not have as much nationalism as in the west of Europe – and mind you, it had communism for a while. At this moment we are all witnessing how they are hosting one of the most exagerrated Eurovision showcases. This thing is not about co-existence, it only fuels more and more nationalism. It makes me very angry, in the same way I am angry to the growing nationalism in my home country.
The young Turkish Republic is a rather diminished nation state built on the ruins of a big multi-cultural, non-colonial empire. The Ottoman style of co-existence (different from that of the short-lived Hapsburg empire) was swiftly replaced with Turkish nationalism and excluded all other cultures that used to live in this remaining part of the Ottoman Empire. Although the new republic was secular in formation, the non-Muslim cultures were the quickest to be kicked out of the new system. Muslim cultures, like the Kurds, remained within the new republic, and were not pushed out as fast as the Greeks or the Armenians, who by then had their own nation states. But this does not mean that the remarkably large Kurdish minority (so large that it is maybe not right to call it a minority) flourished and was made an integral part of the new nation state. They lived – and remain – under various torments. What you see in “The Flag” is the source of this torment. The oath that the kids are taking is something we grew up with, and it is still repeated every Monday morning and Friday afternoon at every single school in Turkey. This is again a ritual, a ritual of the state. As I said above, rituals have the power to create myths. So it is these rituals that create the feeling of citizenship, and subsequently the nation state. Especially in young minds. I strongly agree with Eric Hobsbawm's theory about the two most important things in creating the nation state: national education and military service. “The Flag” is about national education, while its sister work, “I, Soldier” (which is often screened together with “The Flag”) is about military service. With these two works I try to demonstrate the process of nation building. Both national education and military service is obligatory in most nation states. The state makes it unlawful not to send your kids to primary school, as the same state will get you if you refuse to go to the military. Both in national education and in military service, repetitions and recitations are key practices. Students, like soldiers, are taught with verses, songs often supported with music and even dance. During this process a community is being built, because it is ritual time again. We can call this kind of community building “muscular bonding”, since it is attuned to the rhythm of the body, by way of verse or music, or choreography. Like many other millions of kids of the Turkish Republic I underwent this attempt to mold me through these state rituals, and it is no wonder that when I started to express myself with video, one of the first things I did was to go to the stadium when they were celebrating one of these national days. I had to get this out of my system. It is really a kind of exorcism. I had to share it with others who have been subject to this kind of national education.
There is a very famous anecdote that Hobsbawm uses in one of the volumes of his big work about European history: as you know, the state of Italy is quite a new state, like Germany. At the first sitting of the first ever Italian parliament, one of the founders of the nation state whose name I don't recall now, addresses the enthusiastic crowd of MP's: 'Ladies and gentlemen! We have created Italy! Now we have to create Italians!'
This is the spirit of nationalism!
PH - In this work you shot an official celebration ceremony, whereas in TANKLOVE and Untitled you created the action itself as a performance. Can you elaborate on these different formats? Do these different approaches function on the same level within your artistic practice?
KE - I have a love/hate relationship with theater. Although I tried very hard to be accepted in the acting school, after being accepted it didn't take me long to realize that I had made this choice not because I liked theater or wanted to be an actor, but that I liked some kind of performitivity that I couldn't yet describe. So when I moved away from theater and got involved in filmmaking, or let's say contemporary art, it was no coincidence that I found myself making things centered around performances of some sort. I have this theory about 'live performance' versus ' life performance' that I often repeat: that live performance is the aestheticized performance of all art forms, such as theater, cinema and performance art, even exhibitions. 'Life performance' refers to acts we do in order to maintain our cultural lives, whether this is eating, dancing, sex, discipline. Above we named them rituals. 'Life performance' is another way of saying that. Some call it 'cultural performance'. It is performances like these that I find more true. And if art is about truth, then it is necessary to examine performances like these, rather then the artistically beautified performances. So part of my work is to capture on video these kind of 'cultural performances', like in 'The Flag', 'I, Soldier', or most recently WEDDING.
Practices of the other kind are also performative, like in 'Untitled', which is a repetitive performance in reaction to a political problem/abuse, or TANKLOVE, which is a restaging of an historical act in reaction to another political abuse. It is hard to say that these fall more into the category of art and the others aren't, because as soon as you edit the footage of rituals and re-present it, it becomes an artistic expression. I do not worry about that now; I think both of them point in the same direction. With works like Untitled, and TANKLOVE I might be trying to find a different kind of director's theater, while with the other ritualistic works I focus on the director-free theater. Or one which is directed not by an individual but by a community spirit. I think both practices serve the same purpose for me: I am looking for different kinds of 'mimesis'. In this sense, they do function on the same level. They are etudes; different approaches to the same concern.
PH - The third and last work in the presentation is called 'Untitled', wherein you perform yourself, wearing different types of scarves, until you start crying. Does this use of your own body make it a personal protest or statement, or should we not take your personal act that privately? Was it just easier to perform yourself instead of hiring somebody to do the job of ‘acting’?
KE - This was my first video piece. And also the first one in which I am exorcising something. It is my anger toward the president of Turkey at the time, and all the secular elite in general. He was appointed by the publicly elected parliament, but not voted for by the public. He came from a law background, and his assignment was deeply and gladly supported by the army. Shortly after taking the presidency, the general elections resulted in a sweeping victory by the current ruling AKP party of Tayyip Erdogan. They come from a more religious-slash-conservative background. So naturally most of their wives wear headscarves. And in Turkey, like in France, women who wear headscarves are not allowed to enter certain institutions, or spaces that are governed by the state. For example in Turkey, they are not admitted to universities, cannot be civil servants. This is a basic violation of human rights in my point of view, but because a headscarf is unfortunately seen and also used as a religious symbol, the secular- minded population in Turkey sees it as a threat to Atatürk's secular republic. Atatürk died in 1938. Anyway, yet another national day, the biggest one, Republic Day, was around the corner. And traditionally the president holds a Republican Day ball in the presidential palace, which again was first occupied by Atatürk, and is the king of all state buildings/state controlled spaces. Until then [2003] no woman with a headscarf had ever entered that building. None. So this bright president has a brilliant plan: he sends out one-person invitations to all the members of parliament so that their wives will not be able to come. I hate him forever for that. And I had to do something about it. This is why I decided to perform the piece myself. It was my anger, and I had to perform my own exorcism.
PH - The last work you made is called WEDDING, and you made this in Berlin, although that is not something you would clearly notice within the piece. Can you tell a little about this work, about the content, the process and the form?
KE - WEDDING is a very special work for me. It was made over a period of two years. And I now believe that it was not made to be an art piece. It is the piece where I got closest to 'life theater'. I lived inside the Turkish-German community for a long while, and focused on their wedding rituals. All those ideas about rituals I have tried to explain above are the result of this very project. I was able to define my previous works, 'I, Soldier' and 'The Flag', only after making WEDDING. So it is a queen work, like a queen bee. Unchronologically, it gave birth to all the other works.
But let us suffice to say that it is a three-channel video which is composed of several different wedding ceremonies in the Turkish-German community in Berlin, and leave it at that, since it is not part of our exhibition here.
PH - What are you working on at the moment or what are your future plans? Will you continue making both constructed performances as well as shooting existing performances?
KE - My new projects are going to be more in the Middle East. There is one book project about the separation wall in Palestine. A large scale project about the social effects of Turkish TV soaps on the Palestinian society. And a musical documentary about domestic workers in Beirut. Apart from that, I am still going on shooting existing performances. One of them is my interest in gay parades. I have archived quite a few, and the Tel Aviv gay parade is coming up pretty soon...
originally published in the Performing Arts Journal, issue 85, 2007
THE INSPIRATION OF HOME
Köken Ergun interviewed by November Paynter
August 2006
Born in 1976, in Istanbul, Köken Ergun studied with actress Yıldız Kenter and playwright Güngör Dilmen at the Istanbul University Acting Department, followed by a postgraduate diploma in Ancient Greek Theatre at London’s King’s College. He holds a Masters degree from the Istanbul Bilgi University Visual Communication Design Department, with his dissertation entitled Stress on the Contemporary Body in New Media Arts. An earlier Post-Graduate Diploma dissertation was written on The Representation of Iphigenia in Euripides, Racine and Goethe. Ergun is currently a Phd candidate at the Theatre Dramaturgy Department of the Istanbul University.
Between 1998 and 2001 Ergun worked as Assistant Director to Robert Wilson on productions such as The Days Before: Death Destruction & Detroit III. In 2001, he presented his first solo work, a large-scale installation performance, in Istanbul’s Rumeli Fortress. This initial step into art performance led Ergun to move into the field of art video and performance and he began exhibiting in Europe and the United States, at institutions including KIASMA Museum of Contemporary Arts (Helsinki), Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center (Istanbul), Exit Art (NYC), Art in General (NYC), Badischer Kunstverein (Karlsruhe), Sparwasser HQ (Berlin) and Sculpturens Hus (Stockholm). His video works have been screened in film festivals in Europe at both the Oberhausen Film Festival, the Odense Film Festival and at The Amsterdam Documentary Film Festival. In 2004 Ergun was an artist-in-residency in New York, at Location One and he is currently an artist-in-residence at Kuenstlerhauser Worpswede, Germany and the Foreign Artist Exhange of the Austrian Government, in Vienna.
Köken, please tell us a little about your interest in theatre and performance and how you moved away from these fields to begin working in the field of contemporary art.
I think I have always been “dramatic” in a sense. When I was a child I always dreamt of “the other”, almost always being better, stronger than “the self”, but not because I was unhappy with my current state or upbringing. I think I just liked fictionalising and dreaming for the sake of creating a different world around me. So I would dramatize other states, other people, like I was creating my own mythology. My roots go back to the lands of the Ancient Greeks of Asia Minor so I was already very familiar with the myths and legends of the Aegean from an early age. One of the reasons I wanted to study theatre was because of this connection with Greek mythology and theatre.
Maybe I also sensed an existential suffocation at that early age towards the greater world (not necessarily to my immediate surroundings) and escaped from that general reality by being dramatic. Istanbul is a very gray city, it can be very depressing in the winter, very misty and dirty, even more so during my childhood. Not everybody is lucky enough to have a fantastic view of the city or the Bosphorus, and sometimes all you see is a gray city skyline, a poor skyline. I remember Istanbul being perpetually gray, and even as a child I understood about the political struggles and the hard times that consumed it. I knew that there was a better world out there, one that was not so full of struggle and political contestation. So I pictured our surrounding reality from the position of different characters all the time. I could easily relate to those who didn’t live in Istanbul, those that came from other places, non-places. I still like these non-places and enjoy the ability to locate myself somewhere else that is not necessarily anywhere in particular.
Through this relationship with a drama of sorts, I ended up being accepted to an acting school having attended an audition merely to test my abilities. I entered prematurely which perhaps manifested its problems later on and thus I soon realised that theatre was not for me. Or rather this form of representation was not for me. I didn’t find it sincere. I disliked all those Checkovs and Shakespeares. They didn’t fit my body, my body was too Eastern for them. But the teachers forced us to adjust our bodies to these heavy minded creatures that existed in their plays. For me there was little of interest in theatre produced between the time of the Ancient Greek writers and Beckett. The body in these two examples were closer to mine. All the plays and characters that came after Euripides and before Beckett were a mere nuisance to me. With a few exceptions of course, like Maeterlinck who I still feel comfortable with.
Then, just as I was preparing for auditions for film schools I found myself working with Robert Wilson. He showed me a different aspect of theatre. He made me aware of the importance of timing. Not specifically his own timing, but a sense for timing in/for a work of art. I think this is one of the most important elements of art production. It is all about timing, as Bob (Robert Wilson) would say.
Bob wouldn’t “teach” me things, he wouldn’t teach anyone anything. What he did was much more interesting, he would create a space for you to think that there is an alternative. This is very important and many people who criticize his work today overlook this important motive in his practice. Once you understand that there is another, you can move on yourself. This is pretty much similar to the teachings of Shamanism, Taoism, or that of Bektashis in Turkey. As soon as I understood this other, I moved towards contemporary art and away from theatre, also away from Bob’s work, which I found a very natural development, and I think he would be comfortable with it too. So, with this new sense of timing that I had acquired, I felt more comfortable working in the field of contemporary art, especially with video and performative video.
Can you explain why you chose not to pursue this new sense of timing within the genre of performance itself and instead chose to work mainly with video, which steps away from the act of live performance into that of documentation?
I am still not content with the representation techniques of either theatre or performance. Many things disappear in repetition or staging. In other words, there are two kinds of performance: the first is performed not for the sake of performance, but for any other reason, either to continue the flow of life (like eating or sex) or to serve a cultural reason (like discipline or punishment). I call this life performance as opposed to live performance. The second is performance made only for the sake of re-performing these first forms of performance. It is pure repetition, but we are somewhat afraid to call it so. We call it art instead. We call it theatre. Brecht said “everything is theatre”. It is true, but then why repeat it on stage and ruin it? I have gradually come to have a problem with this. When I was in the first years of my acting studies I absolutely loved the idea (of mimesis), but now I prefer the first form of performance, the natural one. Actually you don’t even need to describe it as natural because there should not be an unnatural. Just like the Chinese do not specify gender in language, so being male or female doesn’t mean anything and being naked doesn’t mean anything either… I want the Western world to be more like this in terms of performance.
It would be interesting if there were no theatre for a while, no stage, no performances, just a very long hiatus; during which period we can come to accept that everything is an act of performance by itself, without direction by another. The world exists and moves by itself, not by mankind. The whole idea behind Western performing arts is the central figure “I”. And this is why I don’t like the theatre we see everywhere, or the performances we see in the art world. The most selfish “I” is still too central. Both the actor and the director think that by putting themselves in the foreground they will achieve something. What they achieve is a perfect repetition. Or perfect egoism. But, I think to re-present a performance (of the first form) by another un-live medium like video is more interesting. This is why I started to document performances of the first kind and apply my own direction with a very little editing, just to help link the timing of the individual segments into a single work. I don’t want to add more to the original performance I have simply filmed.
There seems to be a strong tendency for artists in the region of the South East Mediterranean and East Europe to work in the medium of video and often by using some form of documentary technique. Reasons for this include the relatively cheap cost of shooting simple handheld video footage, the ease of sending work abroad for exhibition and the perception of curators from overseas who still seem to prefer work that depicts other cultures as succinctly as possible. Along with a shift towards photography this similar approach to video was prevalent in the Free Kick exhibition presented during the 9th Istanbul Biennial and in which you participated. Can you comment on the commonality of video in the region?
I think it is not only these practical reasons that make video a preferred medium amongst artists in the Middle East. I think we have much to tell and video seems to be the perfect medium for this. Video is an extension of film, which is an extension of theatre, which is an extension of performance, which is an extension of ritual. All of these creative forms contain drama in it one way or another. Or rather a form of story telling, if we attribute an Eastern term instead of the Western use of “drama.” If you look at the region’s past; painting and sculpture have not been a common artistic practice for story telling. While in Christian culture they prospered due to their depiction of religious myths backed by the church. Islam and Judaism prohibited any visual representation of religious figures or myths. Therefore, painting does not exist in the same way as a driving force for contemporary fine art practice in this region. In the same way periods such as Abstract creativity did not emerge in the medium of painting, but proffered more in the form of literature (mostly poetry), and much later, via a borrowed modernism, from film. A clear example of this is the strength of filmmaking in Iran. On the other hand, for us documentation is also a way of story telling, because I think there is so much happening in the region that it cannot be interpreted in a logical way. We like to capture and represent narratives with no personal commentary, either visual or verbal. So the documented event tells its own story.
This does not mean that our Western counterparts have less to tell. But I do believe that they have been saying the same things for over a century now. Back in the 30s, one of the strongest critics of the modern Western individual, Robert Musil argued in his The Man Without Qualities that “in history there is no change.” The exhaustion of the Western civilization, and the Western self (again the “I”) was almost complete at the time of his writing. Since then the dam has not broken, it has not even cracked. Western society continues to chew over what it already had in its mouth back then. I think in the Eastern parts of the world we have more food on our plates, so we don’t hold it in our mouths for so long, we either spit it out in anger, or digest as much as we can. I think mediums that have more “storage space” for story telling transform our large resources and our desire to project them in a more productive way. Painting, sculpture and even photography have less storage space in this sense, so maybe that’s why we resort to video.
Those who left Turkey in the 60/70s to follow opportunities in Europe and America rarely returned. But, now the trend appears to have shifted and this generation find it more productive to divide their time between home and away, and to communicate the inspiration they get from life in Turkey elsewhere and to share their experience of living elsewhere back home. Your movements over the last six years, with periods spent in Istanbul, London and New York, exemplify this tendency. But you maintain that your inspiration nearly always comes from home, in particular from Istanbul. Do you therefore find it beneficial to produce work elsewhere with distance from the original subject and in the context of a different form of cultural perception and how do you differentiate the way you experience and are inspired by your home city of Istanbul and other cities you have lived in such as London and New York?
I have never been as inspired by any city other than Istanbul. This doesn’t mean that most of my works taste of Istanbul, as they say. I think it is the embodiment of the city and its character in my work, and in my character. In a city you grow up in and interact with; you copy attributes of its architecture, its people, its public transportation system, its nightlife. I operate pretty much like the architecture of Istanbul for example. And with architecture I am talking about is the architecture that you wouldn’t even call architecture. It is an architecture that develops not according to styles or creators (again the “I”), but according to necessity and flow of daily life. So just like the two forms of performance I described earlier, architecture also comes in two forms. It is the first form that integrated with my body, but the second I was taught to integrate my body with.
Unfortunately, in modern Turkey we are being taught to live in the organized and self-centred created by Western culture. Just imagine: teaching a child of Istanbul to live as a Western urban citizen in an organized system. Imagine what he sees around him and what he is taught. This is why the new expensive schools in Istanbul are built outside the city like gated communities of say 70s/80s London, so that the children of wealthy or pretentious Western-type families can’t see the real world outside. This points out the most obvious character of Istanbul: it is a city of dichotomies. This city is the epitome of being ‘bi-’. It can embody any given attribute in two or more different states at the same time with an absolute chaotic comfort. For example, if you leave it to its most natural form, many Western attributes will not apply here. But, we don’t leave it to its natural form. We force it to change. We raped this city and its people to look like, to feel like, to walk like, to dress like Westerners. The petrified, mutant body that comes out of this rape is what inspires me the most. And ironically I am one of these mutant bodies, so I constantly question my own existence and my own positioning in Istanbul first as a micro-cosmos and also in the world as a macro-cosmos. Therefore, being away from Istanbul and re-thinking it from a Western geography and culture does lead to a more cohesive understanding of my own self and culture.
On the other hand, in Western cities I am more interested in the minorities than the indigenous community. In New York for example, I am inspired by black culture. Although we Turks have no immediate historical or geographical similarities with them, I feel closer to them for some reason. I think it is something to do with trying to distance oneself from colonial attitudes. I first felt this attraction to black culture at a nightclub, in one of the old Body & Soul parties. Everyone was dancing with the same enthusiasm and exorcism I saw in the countryside of Turkey. I was not taught to dance like that, I was taught to imitate the Western detached way of dancing. It is very hard to explain. I can’t describe it with words…
Two recent works in particular reflect on the mutant body. The first is “Untitled”, 2004 and the second “I, Soldier”, 2005. In Untitled you present a series of self-portraits of yourself applying and donning a variety of headscarves in different styles and with different ties devised by a range of Islamic traditions. Viewing a man undertake this procedure at first gives the work a comic stance, but the austerity and seriousness of his intent and later his tears imply the societal contradictions and trauma that this solitary appendage induces. Whereas “Untitled” is concerned with a female, religious relationship with the bigger societal picture, “I, Soldier” presents the opposite extreme of bodily trauma experienced in Turkey, that from a male, secular position. Filmed during a national day dedicated to the youth of the republic, this two-channel work shows a soldier voicing with grandiose authority a nationalistic military poem. In Turkey every male youth must complete a period in the military and many view this imposition as a form of mental and bodily trauma. In “I, Soldier” it is not only those in official uniform that are seen going about their regulated duties, but also boys from the military school who perform rehearsed activities either in synchronisation with the rest of the group, or its antithesis - in competition against one another. Can you describe your interest in specific cultural bodily trauma in the two works “Untitled”, 2004 and “I, Soldier”, 2005.
Both are similar in the way they deal with the mutant body I mentioned earlier and its dichotomies (I deliberately use it as plural) - in both works I celebrate these dichotomies. The headscarf piece Untitled was inspired by a deliberate and ugly act of the current president of Turkey. The wearing of headscarves is not permitted in state controlled spaces in Turkey, such as its universities, court-houses and even the parliament for that matter. Despite Turkey being one of the strictest secular countries in the world, its public elected a conservative party with Islamic tendencies, which was actually quite successful for a while. However, as soon as they came to power the lowbrow, high-bureaucrats and the army started to exaggerate the headscarf issue, which has been an ongoing argument since the 70s. On the Republic Day the president always hosts a ball at the presidential palace, which is also another state space where headscarves should normally not be allowed. But, because almost all wives of the members of the Justice and Development Party wear türban (headscarves), in order to avoid this clash of the secular and sacred, the president arranged for and distributed one-person invitations for the ball, in effect allowing only the husbands to attend. This outraged me and I wanted to apply the stress of living with a headscarf on my own body. So I made Untitled in which I wore different types of headscarves over and over until eventually I burst into tears at the end.
The work I, Soldier is a personal exorcism about my fear of the military discipline and also my secret attraction to its male qualities. There are two national days in Turkey dedicated to certain age-groups: the 23rd of April (denouncing the Ottoman parliament in Istanbul and opening of the new Turkish parliament in Ankara in 1920) is dedicated to kids of primary school age, and the 19th of May (the start of the war of independence against the Allies in 1919) is dedicated to the youth of high school age. So, during one’s schooling, you experience both of these horrid relics. For the celebrations, children are trained to take part in choreographed performances, which take place in the biggest stadium in the city. And despite the bitter Istanbul weather (it often rains during these two days and is even colder in the East of the country) you are forced to wear tights, march around the running circuit, salute the mayor and an available general, make ridiculous movements, mimicking both the socialist-realist ceremonies (and some of the Russian Futurists for that matter) and the Olympic games… So one day, I decided to video tape all the state day celebrations of the Turkish republic one by one, thinking that I would put them all together at the end. But, there was one soldier that I came almost face-to-face with in the stadium, screaming nationalism from the top of his lungs, and it was his position that encouraged me to make a single work around the May 19th celebrations. Every male citizen of Turkey has to do his military service for twelve months and I still haven’t done mine because I am studying. When I listened to this one soldier it occurred to me that I would be trained in the same manner whenever I do my military service. Even after months of completing the work, I am still afraid of him, my hair stands on end when I hear him screaming. The more I show him to other people the better I will exorcise him. So I think it is a very personal work, but it also means a lot in different ways to other people. One European curator resembled it to Leni Riefensthal’s Olympia for instance.
Do you think that the bodily stress that you perceive in these subjects is just that, a perceived stress from outside, or is it a stress that is also endured by the subject and how do you differentiate between the two?
In Untitled, it is her stress and my stress combined, and both are very internal. In other words, I didn’t make this video as an Orientalist would write about Beirut from his cold home in Weimar… The headscarf issue has been an ongoing issue for the Turkish public as long as I remember. It is all around us, whether you are a believer or not. So there is absolutely no way of staying perpetually isolated from this bleeding wound in our society. Over the years, my observations accumulated to be able to have a general idea of what these women are facing and prior to performing the piece for video, I spent time with friends and distant relatives who wear headscarves. I have listened to their stories about the hardships as well as the comfort of wearing a headscarf. You would always read such stories in newspapers, or see it on television, but this is perceiving the stress from the outside, because there is the medium of “the media” in between you and the subject. And most of the media in Turkey is either pretentious (mimicking the West), or controlled in one way or another by the state or corporations who suck on the tits of the state. But when you have a closer human contact with the türbanlılar (Turkish slang for women who wear headscarf: türbanlı) you can appreciate their dilemma more. On the one hand, you have the Islam religion, which says you have to obey the book, Kuran-ı Kerim, which in turn says all female believers should cover every part of their body, but the face and hands. If you consider yourself a Muslim woman, you must apply this to yourself. At least this is what they believe. Then on the other hand, you have a republic of only eighty something years on top of an Islamic empire of five hundred years who prohibits women covering their head in state controlled spaces. Is this freedom?
Of course a third aspect to the story is radical Islam, which we Turks knew and experienced centuries before the West woke up to its reality after 9/11. Radical Islam is operated solely by male power and intellect, and often uses the turban as a symbol for their case against the secular state. They often use the word “chastity” in relationship with the turban, placing the other women who don’t wear it in the category of prostitutes, and this in return forces the turban wearing women, to act like symbols of chastity. Can you imagine a bigger stress than this? At the end, as you can see there are three major kinds of stress imposed on a türbanlı women; one by the religion which orders them to cover up, the other by the state which “encourages” them not to, and third by the radical Islamists who uses them as the symbol of their case/movement. Therefore, women who wear türban cannot be free and detached from all these major stressors, but they will also not go out there and scream at the top of their voices that they are stressed. To think like this is very naïve. So they often keep the depression inside, which I find very sad, and unfair. It is these feelings, which bring me close to them. I know that having been raised with a secular-Western attitude, I cannot fully appreciate their situation, but I definitely got a hint of it when I was wearing these turbans and constantly watching myself in the mirror. It helps to deconstruct your given identity for a moment.
“I, Soldier” was shown in the hospitality zone of the 9th Istanbul Biennial in the exhibition “Free Kick. A number of works in this exhibition caused political backlashes. Were you concerned that your piece could create controversy in this context?
I was a little bit concerned about the specific soldier in the work, who reads the poem. I recorded his entire performance at a very close angle and didn’t ask his official permission. But on the other hand, this entire performance in the stadium is open to public and anybody is allowed to film it. That is the whole idea behind this public performance, promoting pride and honour of your homeland. I had infiltrated into an area where only press is permitted, but still, as part of the loose discipline that you see in Turkish police, the guards who are supposed to control that area didn’t even ask me what I was doing. If you look “different” enough, they wont touch you. They think you are the other, eccentric media/artist type. This is part of the chain of dichotomies that I keep talking about. The irregular but friendly use of discipline in Turkey is something I absolutely adore. The Western world would describe this as “uncivilized.”
Showing your works in different locations can result in complex questions that relate to locality and geography. “Untitled”, (2004) was recently shown in New York, how do you feel this work translated in this specific context and how was the response to the work different in New York to the response it received in Turkey?
Most viewers there found it beautiful, and intriguing. I can never forget an Upper East side type woman with heavy make up and huge hair exclaiming: “Oh wow! This is so beautiful, I’d love to have it in my living room!” If you don’t know the wide conflicts around the issue of the headscarf, it is natural that you would find it beautiful, because in a way it is also playing with religious portraits in Western art but this is not the primary concern of the piece. My concern was more about portraying the stress on the female Islamic persona, enforced by the secular state. First of all, although America is defined in its constitution as a secular state, in practice I believe that it does not truly maintain a secular situation. Therefore, Americans are not familiar with the secular sanctions against religious practitioners, as you would see in France or Turkey. It is not part of their life yet, but I am sure it will be. This work can best be understood by viewers who are enlightened about Islamic practices, because it is complex and confusing enough and I like that, I like to point in one direction, but shoot in another. For example, although I have a critical approach to the military pride in I, Soldier, I also like the fact that some elder women in Istanbul cried while watching the work. They thought it promoted the army in a very strong way. You see, nowadays because of the new government the army is criticized a lot in public and the elder generation finds it hard to believe because they are still under the impression that they lived with its support for so many years. When I showed it to my mother and aunts they also thought I was promoting being a soldier in Turkey.
The performance “Homeland Security” that you made while on residency in New York refers to a more recently enforced form of bodily stress that in America became most evident after 9/11. By introducing a security control at the gallery entrance were you more interested in exploring the audience’s reaction or the effect of the work as a statement within your own practice?
Both. It was a playful work, even a nasty one. Like in Untitled and I, Soldier it points in one direction, but shoots in another. It was dealing with a form of discipline we were already accustomed to in the Middle East, but was new to the West at that time. When I was working for the Istanbul Festivals I witnessed many Western audience members complaining about our routine security checks prior to their entrance to the concert halls. Some guests arrogantly attributed this to Turkey being a police state, and some argued that it was a violation of human rights. They simply didn’t comprehend why such controls were necessary and didn’t have the remotest idea how they could be daily routine for us. After 9/11 the “Free West” became introduced to the security discipline of the “Policed East.” However, the art world was still immune from these security checks, so when I was invited to make a new work for a public art exhibition called Public Execution that used Exit Art as their opening venue, I wanted to see all the so called “art elite” subject to a security check. Virtually every guest was surprised to see be confronted by a metal detector and two security officials waiting for them. While some guests were obviously annoyed, the majority entered in silent submission. Almost nobody thought that it was a work in the exhibition, which I liked a lot. I also deliberately used African American security officers to add to the stress, and documented the whole process with three cameras.
In New York you did produce several works related to the local context. How do you feel that the new influences that surround you in Germany and Austria, where you are currently based, will affect your artistic practice in the short and longer term? Will these other cultures ever inspire you more than home?
They both trigger different kinds of inspirations. I have found home away from home in Berlin for example. I am working with Turkish immigrants, shooting their wedding ceremonies. Weddings are another form of life performance for me and the Turkish community in Berlin is very “grotesque,” stuck between their conservative but relaxed Eastern origins and a liberal but uptight society. In a way, I have found the perfect Turkish mutant bodies in Germany, and to see them perform with their confused identities within the traditional ceremony of a wedding refreshes me. I am planning to represent this condition of the “grotesque” in my new works.
Of course, in Europe, wherever there are immigrants, there is also nationalism, and even racism. In Austria this is strikingly noticeable. Last year, during an election campaign, the ever-homogenous streets of Vienna were adorned by the billboards of a right wing political party that read “Vienna Will Not Be Istanbul”. This text was accompanied by a portrait of the party leader, his arms crossed, trying to look serious, but with a stupid grin on his face. It was frightening. This form of constipated racism infuriates me, but it also gives me a lot of material to work with. In general, I have serious issues with nationalism. I find it dangerous and aesthetic at the same time; very performative. In my works I have been trying to deal with this phenomena, and what I see in present day Europe drives me to keep working with it. Ironically, nationalism is as yet still a baby. It is a relatively recent product of the dual revolution (the French Revolution and the British Industrial Revolution). This new-born nationalism finally led the world to its partial destruction in the 1st World War. Despite this destruction humankind cultivated it into a form of racism, which in turn caused the 2nd World War. I think that this history is only the teenage angst of nationalism and there is so much more to come. I won’t be so naïve to say that art can save us from this evil, but it can at least propose a different perspective. I myself would be happy if I can facilitate this slightly. Therefore, yes, in general the West also inspires me.
