[As sub]..we began to experience forms of openness as we explored the dynamics of acting together.
Developed organically around a motivation created by İlayda Tunca, Ezgi Yurteri and Melih Aydemir and formed through the participation of Sebastiano Pala, bilemezsin, Emin Yu, Zeynep Beler and Cem Örgen, the initiative produced a series of public space installations during September and October.
By taking the city as a space of its time, beyond a pre-constructed conceptual framework or plan, we aimed to experiment with random structures and to produce, relate, and make sense reflexively.
We witnessed the deconstruction between ‘memory’ and ‘the public’ while observing the ongoing changes in Turkey; the reconfiguration of names, dates, places, and transformation of the collective memory and thus the public opinion, particularly in Istanbul.
While exploring the possibilities of public involvement and re-reading the city through discoveries in Balat, Moda Coast and Büyükada, we can speak of a motivation that arose from the need to stretch the assertion of art, structures of institutions and forms of display.
We have created a dispersed movement by interrupting and expanding the structural forms, and intervened with the city. The works were produced with a possibility of a fragile return by ’leaving up’, then settled into the city, clung, stuck and left behind.
patches 1, 2, 3, etc. büyükada, istanbul - 2019
We were all here and so too was all else. Added to all the pieces we revolve around and that revolve around us. Here arose Bet, coming before Aleph and following Gimmel. Here we went round and around, and so too did all else. Up and down, left to right, zigging and zagging and racing through labyrinths, we add and subtract our way along and multiply continually. We grasp for the order within the haphazardness of the pieces gathered together.
The fifth of the rebirths described in C. G. Jung’s Four Archetypes is “participation in the process of transformation”. This is a kind of rebirth in which the already existing is transformed through indirect means. It is an infinitely repeating kinesis in which all that comes in contact bleeds together and is altered. [Excerpted from text by Nursaç Sargon]
invisible threads @ karantina mekan, izmir - 2019
Here I am like a penitent in a confessional. I want to tell you' howl feel, but thereʼs nobody on the other side of the screen.
What did I expect?
This is a virtual world.This is a world inventing itself. Daily, new landmasses form and then submerge. New continents of thought break 0E from the mainland. Some benefit from a trade Wind, some sink without trace. Others are like Atlantis —fab‘flOlIS, talked about, but never found. Found objects wash up on the shores of my computer. Tin l Cans and old tyres mix with the pirateʼs stuff. The buried treasure is really there, but caulked and outlandish. Hard to spot because unfamiliar, and few of us can see What has never been named.
Iʼm looking for something, itʼs true.
Iʼm looking for the meaning inside the data.
Thatʼs Why I trawl my screen like a beachcomber - looking for you, looking for me, trying to see through the (ii-58111.5".I 9“ I
Iʼve been looking for us both all my life. ‘
beachcomber - 2018
nights on instagram - 2015 - ongoing
2nd order- 2012-18
[Zoom in]
A YouTube video. 2D view of a tub of ant sand. With impossible speed, the ants drill vertical, erratically branching tunnels. Their highways form a picture.
I know a girl who as a child had a babysitter that would switch the TV to a channel with no signal and tell her that the static was a documentary about ants. And the girl would watch that for hours.
[Scale into]
Cold defined as lack of heat but heat not defined as such. (Heat too much of a thing, cold too little.) Both states existing by the expedient of being pitted against one another.
Reaching across the spectrum, a compromise of meaning.
Texture as the hissing sound of water on the pan.
Entropy explained in five words. “You can’t stir things apart.”
Squint and you can see. [Invert your head]
The body of the ant as a square, migrating through the surface, as you microscale roughly four hundred times. (Split) Images (Repeat) form new dualities. (Line break.)
The constituents merge without disturbing.
[and out]
and sand [book] - 2018
The evolution of the world can be compared to a display of fireworks that has just ended: some few red wisps, ashes and smoke. Standing on a cooled cinder, we see the slow fading of the suns, and we try to recall the vanished brilliance of the origin of worlds. — Georges Lemaître
hurtling through space [book] - 2017
The departure point for Writing Remains is asemic writing, a wordless, open-ended form of writing that is seemingly a vacuum of meaning. One of the first known examples of this form of writing belongs to two calligraphy masters who lived in China during the Tang Dynasty era—“crazy” Zhang Xu known for his slapdash and contentless calligraphy works and “drunk” monk Huai Su. In later historic periods, this tradition could be traced in different works, including the contentless, text-based works by the Dadaists in the 1920s; Kandinsky’s textual abstractions; Roland Barthes’s contentless paragraphs and letters that he referred to as Contre-écritures. Similarly, Cy Twombly’s blackboard paintings that could be perceived as commentaries on the “legibility” of painting, also serve to underscore the sheer painterliness of text, a curtain of meaning that becomes permeable in relationship to the viewer’s ability to read. In this sense, different examples of asemic writing’s common denominator is not that they contain little information, but rather that they include too much information.
Today, modes of expression that relate to the act of writing have become “fleeting” just like many other things have in the Internet era. At the same time, the script-shaped stains that one encounters on Istanbul streets present the most primitive technology as a solution to the problematics of expression. In these examples, the authoritarian structure inadvertently generates asemic abstraction.
writing remains - 2017
The empty houses of photographer and post-internet artist Zeynep Beler speak volumes about her stance toward real estate politics in Turkey, the buildings, left unachieved, looking both mournful and striking in the bright daylight. Entitled The Estate, the series negotiates the vacant space of these structures, picking out details of ripped out pipes and the marks of torn out kitchen appliances. Life has left this territory even before it could arrive; yet all the traces of projected life are still there. New patterns appear on the wall, dust settles on the floor. Beler does not give an outright critique in these images, she merely shows the territory she finds through her lens. — Katja Taylor
the estates - 2014
exhibition view, istanbul modern, 2015-16
exhibition view, berlinartprojects, 2016
