Guise of Memory

Alper Aydın / Selin Balcı / Ayça Ceylan / Elçin Ekinci / Erdal İnci / Ali Şentürk
Curator: Rana Kelleci
21.04.-21.06.2017

Nietzsche, in his second essay in On the Genealogy of Morals*, has departed from the concept of “memory” to explain the sources of repression in the modern society. The practices aiming the creation and continuation of memory causes guilt and shame, which in turn inhibits individuals from feeling the intensity of life. In other words, leaving them in an inert state, open to repression.
The exhibition, Guise of Memory, focuses on the relationship between memory and repression trying to find links between Nietzsche’s ideas and our contemporary world. The works pursue this exploration starting from the global context going down gradually to the local and individual levels. The title of the exhibition aims to raise a suspicion and to make way for a deeper questioning about the concept of memory.
Selin Balcı’s video work ‘The World’ depicts a world map constructed of microbial growth on a board. Referring to the early periods of our universe and evolution, the work leads the viewer to an inquiry about humankind’s efforts to understand and categorize the past. It is also possible to derive a meaning towards historiography, which is the foremost tool to create and preserve memory in the modern world.
Alper Aydın, in his work ‘The Real Weight of Stones I’, presents a scene taken from Cape Jason, a place close to his hometown in Turkey’s Black Sea region, with a small intervention. The artist has written the weight of each stone on their surface with water-based paint. The multi-layered structure of the location gained throughout the history, is parallel to the memory of nature. Within time, natural forms also went under transformation, which can be traced back from the stones. While the action of identifying the weights of stones resembles to humankind’s effort to create and document memory, use of water-based paint -actually an environmentally conscious decision- opens our ability and accuracy up to discussion.
Erdal Inci’s video, ‘Istiklal Street’, involves repeated movement of lights on the Istiklal Street in Istanbul. As an important touristic and cultural district of the city since the Ottoman period, Istiklal Street has place in the history as a point of encounters between people from diverse backgrounds and social standings. In Inci’s work, repetition appears as a motif to represent monotony, which can be read as a perspective / foresight of repression in the context of current politics and gentrification debates going on about this neighborhood. The debates often point to the deconstruction of cultural memory and its reconstruction towards adopting different meanings. In the context of this exhibition, this works stands as a questioning of Nietzche’s prerequisite for repression. Is it the existence of memory that paves the way for repression or is it the deconstruction of memory?
Ayça Ceylan’s work ‘Locked with Mind, Surrogate Garden II’, is a documentation of her performance project. It takes place in the ancient city, Patara in the Mediterranean region of Turkey. With its multi-layered history, the ancient city is an important site for historiographers, archeologists and for all professions who seek to understand and categorize the past. The artist uses dance in her performances exploring the emotional, primitive side of the human. By making a performance mixed with dance moves at an important location for cultural memory, she raises her own question: maybe knowing too much about the past actually inhibits us to live and enjoy ‘today’?

Elçin Ekici’s installation ‘Defined Existence Area’ is composed of systematically placed pairs of compasses. The compasses try to draw their own limits in an already limited area. The lines they draw sometimes form a full cycle. Sometimes, they form more then one cycle and meet or intersect with each other. The installation is a straightforward depiction of limits that modern society draws for the individual; the repression itself.

Ali Şentürk’s photograph, ‘I Never Promised You a Rose Garden’, is built on the story of a mental patient who fell in love with a garden sculpture. A mental patient is the individual that is off limits for the authority, as it does not possess any, or possess very little, material or immaterial things. Memory, included in the immaterial category, is often fragmented for a mental patient. This is the reason why authority or the source of repression cannot affect it. This work is placed as an alternative to the modern society that Nietzsche criticized as being repressive.

*Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemical Tract, Second Essay, Guilt, Bad Conscience and Related Matters, translated to English by Ian Johnston, 2014, re-edited from the version of 2009.