Artists: Caner Aslan and Dinea Seshee Bopape
Curator: Övul Durmusoglu
7 April - 8 May 2010
Opening: 7 April, 18:30
Sesim silahimdir/ My voice, my weapon of choice takes its title from the opening line of ‘This is’ by the cult disco queen Grace
Jones. She was on tour last year for her recent album titled Hurricane, which includes the particular
song. When she announces this line, we who love her, clearly understand what she
means. For Grace Jones has carried herself proudly for who she is, being a muse
for many by doing that.
The phrase
‘weapon of choice’ literally stands for signature weapon; that is a weapon that
makes a character so famous by using it. Being especially designed for them or
enchanted, these weapons can only be used by heroes. They empower and transform
them like the power sword of He-Man. It is not only associated with computer
games of intense tactical takes but also a famous Fat Boy Slim song with its
unforgettable video played by Christopher Walken. To some it can also echo
Subcommandante Marcos saying ‘Our Word is Our Weapon’. To the children that
grew up during eighties, ‘weapon of choice’ carries the confronting voice of
eighties facing conservative measures taken by governments. The phrase is not
directly translatable to Turkish. The
past imagination of the country is not contained in the contemporary language,
which precludes a certain precision. This fact is also connected to the split
nature of history. When the phrase is literally translated, it carries a sort
of military accent that we try to get rid of for many years.
In the framework
of the exhibition bringing together Dineo Seshee Bopape (Polokwane, 1981) and
Caner Aslan (Malatya, 1981) the phrase echoes the power of choosing, that is
how ordinary things can be transformed into vociferous objects of confrontation
by being chosen. In the crowded bubble
world of contemporary art, differentiating singular voices becomes a
fundamental weapon of choice for the artists. Both of the artists realizing Sesim
Silahimdir/My Voice, My Weapon of Choice have a curious relationship
with mundane things and their functions. When they make use of everyday objects
as part of their particular storytelling, they become obsolete and enchanted at
the same time with the potential of creating new scenarios. By making those
choices from all accessible imagery that Boris Groys calls to have ‘equal
aesthetic rights’, they introduce their audience to a variety of connotations,
personal and collective, to relate with the world. “The source of the impact
that these images exerted on subsequent art production,” says Groys explaining
this dynamic logic “lies not in their exclusivity, but instead in their very
capacity to function as mere examples of the potentially infinite variety of
images.” While Bopape searches for the layers of more personal in her seemingly
frivolous, complex playground spaces, Aslan plays with the ways of looking at
displaced memories proposing his own archaeology for past and future in now.
When Bopape
utters ‘ I like to remember things in my own way,’ she invites people to enjoy
themselves in her own cosmos of possible reminiscences. Some of the means she uses to create that
cosmos in gallery space are plastic lawns, disco balls, artificial plants,
arbitrary light bulbs, ripped and shredded fabrics, cracked and broken
umbrellas. The open-ended installations she produces out of such unexpected components,
drawings, performance, visual/audio collages and videos are the performed
phrases and re-collections/memories of her life and of other possible lives. Bopape
doesn’t like to remain within the limits of normative grammar rules. The language
she makes herself subject of emerges out of the casual experience and it
vocalizes itself differently every time it happens. Her narratives of
overlapping imagined and real spaces may not contain other human subjects but
they fire our imagination with their evocations.
In the film
series Back to the Future, the
photographs and documents have an exclusive priority because they perform the
change the protagonists create through their travels in time. While the future
changes, the photos representing the future changes accordingly. A similar phenomenon happens in the Stalinist
times, when a high officer disagrees with the party, not only their physical
existence ends but they are also erased from the photos. When reality doesn’t fit the constructed
projection of future, the past is re-written by intervening in the photo
documents. These performances of memory are the inspiration for Caner Aslan’s
installations for Kasa Galeri. This archaeological setting, including the
polaroids of unsued meteorological devices or some reserved tombstones picked
by married couples, aims to seduce the viewer to become detective, searching
for their clues, constructing their plots. It also works as an archive of
situations, objects and milieus speculating different scenarios of the future.
Thus, Kasa
Galeri’s three-roomed space is employed for a few layers of narrative. The
passing room between Bopape’s space of possible reminiscences and Aslan’s
archive of potential future scenarios will be a space of encounter and
confrontation where artists will analyze each other’s weapons of choice.
Artists propose an almost dialectical relationship with each other in terms of
creating milieus for the selected images to come together. The attempt of
conceptual construction about erasure and re-writing that opens the exhibition
meets the playful mannerism of evocation in the form of an open language.
Grace Jones ends
her song by saying ‘This is life’. We make our lives with our weapons of
choice. Sesim silahimdir/My voice, my
weapon of choice proposes a small case study of artistic instincts and
methodologies constructing singular voices of narrating memories and futurity.
Bopape’s and Aslan’s fresh works in dialogue point towards a converged horizon
where we can find different potentials of thinking about our times, also in the
local sense, of rewriting new accents in place of the ones we are uncomfortable
with.
