Voyage Trough Cosmos (Emigration to Vienna), each 5cm X 5cm,  2005

UNDRESSING / SOYUNMA 

Video- performance, 06:19 min. 2006

 As we all know, in the last few years the European opinion on Islam and Muslim countries has changed. The reason for my performance was to question and discuss the situation of Muslim women living in Austria who are affected by the racist climate in the public space, who experience discrimination in everyday live and whose images, for example prior to elections, are abused.

As persons living in Europe, often with foreign nationalities, these women, as well as myself, with or without a headscarf, represent neither Turkey, the Iran, or Afghanistan nor any other country or Islam itself. Even so, they often serve as targets. The majority of Muslim women living in Europe, with or without a headscarf, first and foremost, represent their individual selves and not religious or nationalist ideas.

Nilbar Güres            2006

Stranger 00:10:20, 3 canal installation, 2004

Vicdan Azabi 00:04:20, 2005

Undressing 00:06:20, 2006

Performances; Üsküdar, Fatih, Besiktas, Kadiköy, 4  canal installation, 2008

Unknown Sports; indoor exercises  00:12:30,  2009

Open Phone Booth 00:33:46, 3 canal installation, 2011

Performances

These performances are part of the series “Unknown Sports – Public Space”. They took place in Istanbul in the summer of 2008. If a miniskirt wearing woman is being raped, according to Article 29 of the Turkish Criminal Code related to “Unfair Provocation”, she is considered an accessory to the crime or may be arrested for wearing a miniskirt, because this is seen as a provocative act. In my performances I aim to provoke audiences. For these particular provocations I chose four locations, two of them being shopping and business districts and the other two religiously conservative districts of Istanbul.

Performance in Üsküdar

Üsküdar has a long religious tradition. Here, I am using a book, an egg and a piece of bread. If I were to run, I would have to step against the egg, the book and the bread. The book’s cover shows ornamentations which make it look like a Quran, but in fact, the book is a fairy tale book. Under the pressure of the bystanders my performance was brought to an end.

These performances are part of the series “Unknown Sports – Public Space”. They took place in Istanbul in the summer of 2008.

If a miniskirt wearing woman is being raped, according to Article 29 of the Turkish Criminal Code related to “Unfair Provocation”, she is considered an accessory to the crime or may be arrested for wearing a miniskirt, because this is seen as a provocative act. In my performances I aim to provoke audiences. For these particular provocations I chose four locations, two of them being shopping and business districts and the other two religiously conservative districts of Istanbul.

 Performance in Fatih

Istanbul’s Fatih district is well known for its religiously conservative inhabitants. The day of my performance was a Muslim religious holiday. In the performance I am getting undressed and encouraging passers-by, especially women, to take off my bridal dress.

Ayse loves Fatma, 120cmX180cm, c-print, 2011

Rivers of Heaven, mixed media on fabric, 2011

Bulasik yikayan ve öpülen el & Ütügünü, dyptich each 27,5cm X33cm, 2007

Ayberg, dyptich (mixed media collage on paper+ Photograpy) each 50cmX68cm, 2011

Wrestling, mixed media on paper, 50cmX68cm, 2009

Self- Defloration, mixed media on fabric 36cm X 48cm, 2006

Self- Defloration, mixed media on fabric, framed 193 x 270 cm, 2009

Face, 50cm X 60cm, mixed media on fabric, 2011

Sisterhood of Religions, mixed media on paper, each 27,5cmX33cm, 2011

New Flag, 43cm X 51cm, mixed media on paper, 2011

Happy Birthday Ahmet, Diptych, each 11cm X15cm, 2011

Detail

Detail

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Webcam Sex; Queer Couple Anal Fisting, mixed media on fabric, 2011 

Detail

The Village of Exception

A short introduction

This text was written during the summer of 2011 in collaboration with Vienna based artist Nilbar Güreş. Her new project, “Open Phone Booth” (2007-2011), has been in development for some time and is still a work in progress. The work will be shown at Frieze Frame during October 2011. Following is the story, the artistic research and the discussions that have led up to Güreş’ new work:

The project was born out of Güreş´s occasional visits to her father`s hometown, a Kurdish and Alevi (an ethno-religious minority in Turkey) village in East Anatolia. The village is severely lacking in infrastructure: there is no school or hospital, water shortage and power cuts are part of daily life, and there is still no telephone network in the village. Eight other Alevi villages in the region suffer from similar problems.

At first Güreş was unsure about how to approach the situation, she witnessed the living conditions of her relatives, and shared the everyday reality with them. Güreş could not decide how to cope with her desire to make this picture public, all the while sensing the social gap between her position and the villagers’ and questioning how to help them on a practical level. Rather than a socially engaged art project or social responsibility campaign, she has taken a critical approach and decided to focus her work on the creative and practical solutions that the villagers devised on their own over time.

One of the most drastic changes in their lives has been the advent of communication technologies. A telephone network was introduced during the 1970`s but villagers had to go to the village headman’s office to make a phone call. Though a phone network was promised and the villagers paid the required fees, the village still remains without a telephone network. In 2005, villagers began to benefit from new communication technologies, and most use mobile phones. Though connectivity has been limited in the valley, they are finally able to connect with the rest of the world.

Güreş’ work focuses on the gap between the current picture, controlled by the state, and the direction of global changes. The mobile phone industry as a global force introduced mobility in access to communication. The three screen video installation “Open Phone Booth” (2010-2011) is about this tragicomic reality. It shows the villagers climbing up the hills in order to make phone calls, and their attempts to catch phone reception. The villagers, at different ages and in different groups, are filmed during different seasons of the year. Sometimes in snowstorms or sunny blue skies, sometimes alone or with company. One who wants to contact the rest of the world from this village has to struggle for access to communicate. The seasons, the light, and the landscape change in the film; some conversations take longer, and sometimes the connection is desperately lost, but up in the hills the villagers are always free to call.

In the State of Exception

When we look at the zeitgeist and the setting of the Kurdish-Alevi village in East Anatolia, the political panorama of the imagery is evident. At the same time that Güreş worked on “Open Phone Booth” Turkey’s news media became dominated by stories of the enormous number of losses among the Turkish army due to the war with PKK (a Kurdish organization which has since 1984 been fighting an armed struggle against the Turkish state for an autonomous Kurdistan), also known as Kurdish Workers’ Party. The political atmosphere in the country has long been manipulated by patriotic discourses and nationalistic arguments against peace. Every Kurdish citizen can be considered a potential suspect and therefore can face discrimination by the State. The polarity in the political atmosphere of the country creates tension in the public sense, and people who demand peace have less of a voice in the mass media.

Güreş decided to zoom in on the fundamental aspects of everyday life of the villagers in “Open Phone Booth”. Güreş` interest in connecting us with the village is an artistic gesture with political consciousness. Moreover, her perspective on the village opens a critical window for us in terms of imagining how the villagers operate their everyday life. Defining this picture also brings to mind Agamben and his work on “State of Exception”.

In a “state of exception” suspects lose their rights to represent themselves and accused individuals have no voice. Giorgio Agamben identifies “state of exception” as the decision-making power of one over the lives of many with complete disregard for civil rights against the backdrop of an alleged state of emergency.[1] Agamben’s work is a theoretical analysis of the political distinction between bios (citizen) and zoe (homo sacer) made by those who hold judicial power.

Southeast and East Anatolia, has been in crisis almost since the foundation of Turkey. The state has taken a discriminative and violent approach towards its Kurdish citizens ever since. Kurds have been facing extraordinary measures country wide, especially in the Southeast and the East. The area in which Güres shot her films is part of the region in which a state of emergency was declared 46 times between 1982 and 2002.

Ayşe Kadıoğlu responds to the potential connection between the Kurdish case and Agamben with a reference to Yılmaz Güney`s film, “Yol” (The Road, 1982). Güney is a legendary director from the seventies who described himself as an “assimilated Kurd”, he was imprisoned in Turkey several times due to his “communist actions” and died in Paris in exile. Güney`s film is about the stories of five prisoners who travelled to their towns on probation for a week during the military coup in Turkey. Güney`s approach of focusing on individual stories, and revealing how state sponsored violence is committed at different levels can in turn be linked to Güreş` method of narrating the everyday reality of the villagers. Linking the Kurdish case with Agamben`s argument, Kadıoğlu gives examples from the film such as identification checks or how military officers treat the prisoners and later argues that “it portrays surges of military action against the Kurdish populated villages of southeast Turkey, where people find themselves trapped in their houses while armed conflicts take place between the Kurdish guerillas and the Turkish military.”[2]

The close connection between Güney and Güreş is based on how they both take the autobiographical aspects of their political reality and turn them into portraits about their time. In the Kurdish case, Kadıoğlu thinks “Agamben’s approach, which points to continuity between exception and the rule falls short of explaining Turkey’s Kurdish issue.”[3] Either it is described as a state of exception or of emergency, the villagers still have no phone service from the state, and they suffer from limitations of infrastructure.

Artistic Background

There are several other works that reflect how Güreş works with communities and cultural isolation. When we retrospectively look at Güreş` practice, it is clear that she is interested in developing a gender-specific critical perspective on the perception of identity and culture with a performative approach. Nilbar Güreş (b. 1977, Istanbul) deals with gender issues and narrative possibilities as well as marginalised communities and patriarchal systems through photography, drawings, videos, and collages. Her work has an autobiographical layer in terms of the materials, settings, casting and objects, which she reconstructs in her practice. She works with her family and friends; people whose stories she knows personally. She conceptualizes settings as forms of open scripts while bringing in real stories, and people she knows well.

The series as video, photographs and collages entitled “Unknown Sports, Indoor Exercises” (2009) consists of three performances staged by the artist who worked with housewives and volunteers from feminist organizations at the gymnasium of Marmara University. Considering cleaning the house, body care, make up and house work as everyday exercises and the domestic space as an invisible territory of female identity, the artist creates a conceptual setting for understanding the unspeakable acts of a woman’s world. Female practices such as body hair waxing, styling or vacuum cleaning are becoming their tools or weapons against male power and dominance. On the other hand, the series “Çırçır” (2010) takes place in a neighbourhood confiscated by the state in İstanbul, undergoing a problematic urban transformation. Women who live in a migrant culture dominated by a patriarchal structure are re-liberated as they stir up our collective consciousness in these open-ended scripts where they play the lead. The photographs as fragmented moments of never-ending short stories show women in many scenes with references to her imaginative power and the local context. For her “TrabZONE” (2010) series, Güreş traces a geographic reality that is imprinted on her childhood-memory with an instinct to re-look at Trabzon, an Anatolian city that the artist used to visit as a child.

An early video work “Undressing” (2006) is also related to the project “Open Phone Booth” in terms of its political stance. As an artistic response to the European ‘Islamophobic’ gaze, it is related to how the image of the Muslim women is abused by right-wing politics in order to manipulate the masses in the post 9/11 era. The video performance is based on the oxymoronic relationship between undressing and veiling. It attributes diverse styles of veiling and many types of scarves to the names of the artist’s friends and family members as an autobiographical form of narration.

Back to the Village

Similar to the series “TrabZone” and “Çırçır”, Güreş is also interested in the influence of geographical reality on the narrative politics in this project; and she is using the locations as conceptual stages. Sometimes they are turning into dark theatrical Beckettian atmospheres, sometimes the pastoral imagery is reflected on the choreography of the casting. In one of our conversations, my question directly addressed what the spatial and geographic influences are on her works as far as describing the conceptual plateau when you say “shooting location” and she was pretty clear about the answer: “Generally, what I do before starting a work is look for places where the work can best function. And sometimes my story automatically takes me to the location. Finding the right shooting location to me is like searching and finding the most suitable arena to minimize the subject I seek and its story, which spans over time, into a single, saturated snapshot…”

During the production of “Open Phone Booth”, Güreş collected many (moving or non-moving) images, and recorded many situations as the research data for her conceptualization of the project. She photographed the villagers’ everyday life as well as composed many life stills dealing with how infrastructure can be translated into critical forms of a visual narration. Some of these photographs can be considered as portraits of the villagers, some as still life that compose an ordinary look on how culture and nature are integrated into each other, and others as open-ended narratives with irrational elements of fiction…

In one of those images, different sized bowls used when the water is cut are composed together as a living sculpture. She combines everyday objects with irrational elements, gestures and mimics… In another work we see a non-functional telephone pole, and its cable cut off from a landscape blanketed with snow. The white sky and the snow define an abandoned place or traces of a civilization that does not exist anymore. Observing how water is supplied to households, Güreş develops conceptual compositions with water pipes, and natural water sources, moreover she juxtaposes the associations with an infrastructure that belongs to urban life and nature. Güreş points at the silent witnesses, and reveals a story of resistance and survival.

Composed of a three-channel video installation and some photographic images, “Open Phone Booth” (2007-2011) presents a panoramic stage with elongated fields of view. It is a pastoral poetry about how survival is part of the human condition as well as a lyrical abstraction of the grim truth that some are less equal than others.

[1] Jacques Ranciere . Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man? South Atlantic Quarterly 2004 103(2–3): 297–310
[2] Ayse Kadioglu, “Necessity and State of Exception: Turkish State’s Permanent War with its Kurdish Citizens” in Kastoryano, Riva (ed), Turkey Between Nationalism and Globalization, Routledge, forthcoming in 2012.
[3] Ayse Kadioglu, “Necessity and State of Exception: Turkish State’s Permanent War with its Kurdish Citizens” in Kastoryano, Riva (ed), Turkey Between Nationalism and Globalization, Routledge, forthcoming in 2012.