PICTURES OF NOTHING

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 TABLE OF CONTENTS

About ‘Pictures of Nothing’

In Search of Pictures…, by Arie Amaya-Akkermans
Conversations
Fragments, by Bilge Friedlaender
Doublespeak, by Keyla Çavdar
Representation as Erasure, by Jennifer Mackenzie
Acknowledgements

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About the Exhibition and the Publication

The exhibition ‘Pictures of Nothing’, held at Pg Art Gallery in

Istanbul, is a group exhibition intended to showcase a
historical, methodological and thematic survey of
contemporary abstraction, anchored in the disjunctive
between abstract formalism and the process of abstraction in
general or how contemporary art can in fact think abstractly,
while at the same time being bound by the production of
images. Being as we are, in the periphery, also means to think
both within and against the tradition: The traditional answers
of the Western canon do not suffice in a context so charged,
volatile, endangered and mystified as ours. At the same time,
we do not aim to think without the tradition, aware of the risk
of producing culture in a void: Nihilism is a luxury we can no
longer afford in the face of so many challenges.

While Varnedoe’s book is explicitly Western-centric, we still

share with him an opposition to formalism as a pure form; as
Hannah Arendt pointed out, pure thinking is dangerously
identical with thoughtlessness. Instead, we read with
Varnedoe the abstract in art as an ‘evolving sign system’ that
acquires meaning from social contexts. This sign system is a
multi-sourced, pluralistic and dynamic mechanism capable of
incorporating a multitude of narratives and parallel
beginnings. Accordingly, ‘Pictures of Nothing’ is about
something rather than nothing: Even though our images or
ability to represent is rather depleted, our culture is still
identical with our self-image and points towards a
transcendental horizon. Put simply, the artists in the
exhibition are more than abstract painters: They think
abstractly about a vast array of modern phenomena and want
to invite us to look at the results.

When we say that we want to attempt to live in a world

without pictures, we mean to dwell in that distinction
established by Saloua Raouda Choucair between the visible
and the visual, understanding the latter as being more
complex than mere ‘pictures’. The first section of the
exhibition, ‘Life without Pictures’, is centered on a post-
minimalist process-sculpture (2002-2017) by Devran
Mursaloğlu engaging with the physical presence of
simultaneity. These works are completed by the practice of
younger artists occupied with the nature of space (rather than
place) perception: A fragment from the abolished
constellations of Alexandra Paperno and the post-utopian
architectures of Amba Sayal-Bennet. Sergey Rozhin’s concept
of wood, drawing on the material history of the Ural region in
Russia, amplifies the idea of time as material-process.

In the second section, ‘Sign-Place Systems’, we make

reference to the process of translation and transmission
between language and the ‘event’, or how places (rather than
spaces) contain time within and what it would mean to speak
the temporal as embedded in processes of change. Eda Soylu,
Sandra Çavdar and Katherina Olschbaur address the memory
of transformative moments in Istanbul and Athens, followed
by a subtler meditation about the internal structure of place-
perception by Hala Schoukair, stranded always between
Beirut and New York. As we move further in the direction of
the concrete, the section ‘Formalisms’, takes a look at the
practice of young contemporary Russian artists Vitaly
Barabanov and Petr Kirusha, with a slight reference to the
much discussed ‘zombie formalism’ and attempts to
understand their position.

At last, ‘Historical Dialogues’, engages with responses to the

tradition that oscillate between tribute and critique, not always
related to formal abstraction but more to subtraction/addition
processes. Siberian cultural icon Damir Muratov responds
humorously to the legacy of Malevich, and the late Bilge
Friedlaender, only recently re-discovered in Istanbul,
questions the minimalist tradition in a number of works from
the 1970s. Friedlaender is here part of a dialogue with her
friend and pupil Kevin Finklea, a post-minimalist painter,
who presents in the exhibition a tribute to Raoul de Keyser.
Very pertinent to our interest in periphery, Chris Barnard is
set to investigate the colonial representation of the American
West in modern painting, almost mocking romantic painting
within the context of race thinking.

If you are reading this little book probably you have seen the
exhibition. It wasn’t our intention to produce an encyclopedic
catalog replete with biographies and long curatorial
statements to prove our credentials in the art world; the works
should be left to speak for themselves. At the same time, as an
exhibition curated by an art critic, set in a difficult location
and introducing an unlikely group of artists, lesser known to
the experts, we wanted to produce a catalog that people would
want to keep and not only because of its ‘pictures’, but
because of the possibility of being confronted with so much
more than ‘art’. Set in Istanbul, against a background of
constant transition, it is necessary to relate to ‘Pictures of
Nothing’ not as an evasion of the real but as an attempt to
seek an uncanny return to it.

Accordingly, the texts that you will find in this publication are
not necessarily about art, but relate to art. We wanted to
discuss why it was important to talk about abstraction and the
abstract nature of life today in a place like Istanbul, a classic
paradigm of historical change. The curator of the exhibition
pens down a speculative essay on the search for reality in
images under the condition of crisis, bound to the paradoxes
of Istanbul, accompanied by two short literary pieces: The
young Turkish writer Keyla Çavdar talks about Nazim
Hikmet in the context of ‘doublespeak’, on how to be inside
and outside of a place, emphasizing the unending ambiguities
of this city, so well reflected in the abstract forms that make
up this exhibition. Lastly, American poet Jennifer Mackenzie,
a former Damascus and Istanbul exile, takes a vantage point
to address the paradoxes of American power in such fragile
times.
 In Search of Pictures…

“There’s neither an iron, wooden

nor a tulle certain
in your life;
there’s no need to choose freedom:
you are free.
But this kind of freedom
Is a sad affair under the stars.” –Nazim Hikmet, 1951

This would be the last leg of the journey of making an

exhibition, to be held only two months later in Istanbul. It was
at the Novodevichy Cemetery, on the banks of the Moscow
river, a 19th century burial ground housing the most prominent
Russian dead, from Kruschev to Yeltsin, and everybody in
between. Nazim Hikmet, the Turkish poet, was an unlikely
guest in this lush garden. After living in Moscow for nearly
two years, I didn’t know about the existence of this graveyard,
until the artist Eda Soylu told me about it and upon my return
from Istanbul, I decided to pay a visit. And there he was, this
lone Turk, a proverbial exile, alongside his wife, Vera
Tuliakova-Hikmet. But even in his graveyard the poet
wouldn’t escape paradox: In the middle of this rich summer
garden, the stone slabs were adorned with artificial flowers.
The first modernist voice in Turkish poetry and the central
figure of its canon, Himket spent a long time in prison for his
ideas, and had his books banned in the country for so many
years. Born in Salonica at the beginning of the 20 th century
(the birthplace of Republican Turkey), this cosmopolitan, and
quintessential Turk, died in Moscow without a passport.

‘A Sad State of Freedom’ is the title of that poem written in

1951, and that could be read today without difficulty, sitting
across the Marmara Sea on the island of Heybeliada (the
Princes Islands had been a traditional place of exile for
dissenters since the Byzantine times) overlooking the
Anatolian side of Istanbul with its irregular and rather
monstrous (economic) growth. On the rocky shores of these
ancient waters that have seen the vessels of every empire
traversing them, it is of course difficult to feel free. Yet one is
so free here and now, as Hikmet pointed out. Traveling on a
boat it is possible to reach the Black Sea or the Mediterranean
within a few hours, and from there continue to the Greek
islands. Whether you are a wealthy Turk traveling in the
direction of the Cyclades or a Syrian refugee attempting to
reach Lesbos on a speedboat, the journey is almost the same.
On this gigantic and continuous mass of water, in the same
way that Vordonisi, the 10th of the Princes Islands, sank
around the 10th century, thousands have drowned attempting
to reach the European mainland, making it one of the largest
graveyards in the world; it goes all the way to the bottom of
the sea.
Earlier in the same poem, Hikmet writes thus: “You love your
country / as the nearest, most precious thing to you. / But one
day, for example, / they may endorse it over to America, / and
you, too, with your great freedom -- / you have the freedom to
become an air-base.” Of course this makes you laugh, it’s
supposed to. Laughter as a mechanism against terror, once
you have become not an air-base, but many. The American
writer James Baldwin (he would probably resist being called
an American, except in Istanbul) who would live in Rumeli
Hisari through the 1960s, only 20 kilometers north of the
islands on the Bosporus strait, observed that ‘The American
power follows one everywhere’, watching the US Navy ships
cutting through the strait. Similarly, in the summer of 2015,
we would watch the Russian vessels going in the opposite
direction. What is striking now is not America or imperialism
in itself but the complex and almost untraceable structure of
power in general. We learn from Foucault that power is not
the domination of one body over another, but a ‘multiplicity
of relations of force’, and that this power is everywhere and
comes from everywhere.

Adnan, who came from Hama three years ago running away
from the war – although his father still lives there – is now
just another business owner in the Beyoğlu district, like
Armenians and Greeks were once, in these houses, living
alongside the Turks. His sister plays unmolested in the streets
of Tophane with the other children in fluent Turkish. It seems
as if they are going to be there forever. Another Adnan, in
Beirut, returned to Damascus to work as a teacher, because,
what can you do? To wait for good luck forever? It was
precisely this perverse nature of the new ‘normal’ what would
make us turn to abstraction in a context like Istanbul’s, where
it’s definitely no good time for nihilism. The normal now
isn’t even the state of emergency of Carl Schmitt but a far
more elaborate structure in which there’s no tangible
difference between peace and non-peace, between politics and
governance, between truth and illusion. We didn’t want to talk
about art as a realm, because how can we possible talk about
art when these are the rules of reality? As the insanity of our
current economic system and exhausted political imagination
engulf us closer and closer, how to envision new forms of
temporality? What’s the future?

This exhibition was much less about Turkey and more about
the current momentum. An experiment in which a number of
artists can gather and think collectively through their works
about Istanbul as a paradigm for the kind of historical rupture
we are currently experiencing around the world. The age of
transparency has turned into the age of translucence: A
translucent surface permits light to pass through but diffusing
it so that objects on the opposite side are not clearly visible.
The objects seen from the other side of the glass are not only
opaque but ‘abstract’ and by abstract today is not meant only
complexity and ambiguity but also obsolescence and
irrationality. In that sense ‘Pictures of Nothing’ is preoccupied
with abstraction; life has become too abstract for ourselves to
live in it, and in turn, reality has become invisible. What kind
of uncanny return to the real can art attempt then? What we
are looking for is not the old realisms but a certain type of
transcendental space that was once conjured up by classical
metaphysics and then later by modern art. Transcendental
today is identical with the spiritual, lacking intellectual
relevance.

The city of Istanbul is a remarkable case of what living

abstractly would mean today: An enormous territory beset by
turmoil and the memory (and expectation) of catastrophe, the
self-image of which is trapped inside a dualistic system of
categories lacking in significance and the relic of another era.
The topographical and demographic challenges make urban
planning inconceivably difficult, and this absence of planning
empowers an intolerably brutal economic model to operate at
the street level. An American curator described the city once
as a ‘liminal’ space, but it makes you wonder what that means
when you have to live inside of it rather than touristically visit
it and exploit its resources with the tools that only colonial
privilege can bestow? Living inside of a structure so big but
yet so formless is supposed to work in our advantage,
expanding our consciousness about the world, but instead, it
becomes a handicap: A permanent inability to access the real.
As this happens, the mechanisms of power continue
undeterred expanding the sphere of private property while the
public domain (where the plurality of reality ‘happens’)
shrinks. Private property is identical with liquid (abstract)
capital.

Late capitalism operates in a limited but open-ended universe;

that is to say, it’s internally mechanistic while at the same
time it upholds a profound belief in the ineffable, the
incredible, the unlimited and the infinite. That is its own
confession of faith: The interminability of resources within a
finite earth. In Istanbul, you can see the city cannibalizing
itself, devouring its own limbs and replacing them with limbs
from others that are eventually devoured as well. In this
inverse palimpsest of a city, histories are swallowed whole,
replaced, re-written, and yet again replaced, endlessly, at
times even more than once in the course of a single
generation. This change takes place so fast that people are
unable to notice until it’s already too late. In the same way
that the Turks once came to the islands after the expulsions
and Turkish took over Greek, now Arabic is beginning to
displace Turkish in some streets here and there; it happens at
first so slowly, then all at once. These are the ways of
Istanbul. How can art respond to this and what can art do at
all? What kind of language would be necessary to bypass this
‘event horizon’ of permanent disappearance?

‘Pictures of Nothing’ by Kirk Varnedoe was illuminating for

me not in its blind eurocentrism and the dead boring answers
to the question why abstract art now? (and what an important
question it was!), but because it proposed something I believe
had been thought up by many artists in the past, such as
Zlotnikov or Kandisky, about the possibilities of abstraction
beyond the rigid formalism of Greenberg: Abstraction as an
evolving sign-system that is capable of tackling historical
change, the social and the political. It was precisely another
exhibition inspired by that book, ‘Why Abstract Art?’ held at
Casas Riegner Gallery in Bogota in 2015 what first brought
me to Varnedoe, and to think about making an exhibition
around this theme. Casas Riegner explored Varnedoe’s ideas
through a long century of Colombian and Latin American art.
Nevertheless, the place of Latin American art within the
tradition felt a lot more stable than ours here and working in
Istanbul and Turkey seemed to require a more global, post-
historical approach that would bring to a point not only the
theme in itself but also the conditions under which it is
experienced and thought about locally.

On the same year, I first visited the studio of Devran

Mursaloğlu, in the Dolapdere neighborhood of Istanbul, and
found these small paper sculpture-pieces inside of Plexiglas
boxes lying on a countertop, accumulating dust. Watching
periodically the chaotic and violent transformation of the
neighborhood, a working-class area replete with low-cost
shops, repair garages and small furniture businesses, as a
blue-chip gallery and Turkey’s first contemporary art museum
plan to open a few blocks down, it’s hard not to think about
this colorful example as another (negative) paradigm.
Walking back and forth between Maçka and Dolapdere every
day, Devran would sculpt into her process elements from the
lived memory of this vanishing world onto a clean surface; it
felt like a message in a bottle. The fifteen years old process-
piece, now assembled vertically, would summarize for me the
skyline I contemplate from the island: The infinite growth of
capital versus gravity and common sense has atomized
Istanbul internally into a collection of islets divided by a
viscous substance. The ecosystem functions as a whole, but
the constituting parts do not understand their particular role or
communicate with one another.

And there are other experiences connected with cities: Sandra

Çavdar, working in isolation from the demands of the art
world very close to Baldwin’s Rumeli Hisarli, would watch in
disbelief the transformation of an Istanbul that had once
seemed so familiar, and the almost linguistic signs in her ink
drawings would resemble the combination of high rises,
scaffoldings and disappearing neighborhoods along the shores
of the strait, so that it was precisely the memory of the old
city what had disappeared not only from the physical
landscape but from her own memories: The fragments of
memory were embedded in the invisible, void spaces left in
between the signs – poetry for architectural loneliness. In
1985 when Turkish poet Edip Cansever wrote one of his last
books, ‘City of Hotels’, he lamented with sadness the new
touristic Istanbul that had risen out of nowhere in the district
of Beyoğlu. It wasn’t only grief over this artificial postcard
world, but that it was one without spectators: There were no
tourists to be found. Imagine what he would have thought if
he had seen the pedestrian Istiklal street or the Karaköy
district today.

Abstraction as an experience rather than a formal composition

appears not only in the form of erasure but also of continuous
transformation; a state so permanent that it is never possible
to come to a stand-still, in order to become firmly anchored in
reality – under our feet there is only water. The loose
archeological artifacts torn off from their contexts of meaning
and placed alongside everyday objects in the watercolors of
Katherina Olschbaur, executed during the months of unrest in
Athens in 2011, are the human trace of this disappearance, at
times presented as a form of utopia but in general experienced
only as displacement and uncertainty. As the unrest would
sweep throughout the entire region in the rest of the decade,
we would be left without a metaphor strong enough to
connect the real time of our bodies with the current structure
of knowledge and representation; just as it has happened with
the facades of Istanbul, we have lost our faces. Yet
disappearing does not happen without debris as evidence: In
the burnt wood, replete with flowers buried under concrete,
Eda Soylu has completed the process: Obsolescence is a
heavy material, more durable than a ruin.

Expanse. That’s the word that comes to my mind often when I

want to answer this question: What exactly is the space that
this surface occupies, the surface of the image set against the
impossibilities of the moment? It was on a boat between the
islands, crossing back and forth daily, spending hours on the
water that I began to read Bilge Friedlaender more seriously. I
had seen the heart-breaking exhibition at ARTER, and
thought, this is the most accurate description for Istanbul I
have ever seen: A straight line that breaks, it becomes a
gaping wound, it swallows everything. We were now in the
open water… “Humanity is preoccupied with space and size,
when constrained in small places, like apartments and
congested cities. Whereas when you go down to the open
ocean, you don’t think about size space.” Could it be perhaps
that there’s no abstraction at all? In order to think about the
‘abstract’ you need to resort to certain formalism first, you
have to say there’s this form in there, we ought to destroy it. If
it as if the line was there from the start only to be erased.
Some painters, and I’m thinking of Kamrooz Aram here,
believe that the space needs to be ‘cleared’ rather than ‘filled’.
It is as if the white square were already saturated when you
first looked at it.

The morning before, I had walked to the Terki Dünya

monastery on a hill of the island and sat by the promenade
looking into the sea. It was the most beautiful ‘picture’ you
could ‘picture out’ in this congested city full of small places,
just there, only expanse. But isn’t this image tainted even
before you looked at it? It is colonial imagery in itself, a
vastness so profound that doesn’t admit history or ‘failure’. It
was just like the paintings of the American West hanging on
the walls of the Yale Art Gallery that we had discussed with
Chris Barnard: Bierstadt’s paintings of the American West
Coast were so perfect in their pristine state, covered in a thick
halo of gold hanging from the sky, imitating the sun,
unlimited in their expanse. But the gold wasn’t from the
sky… It was actual real gold (in the accounts of Bierstadt
himself), from the mines, from the mines where the slaves
labored and that made American settlers impossibly wealthy;
this is called white supremacy. In the endless blue of the
Marmara it is just as easy to forget the centuries of conquest
and ‘power’, and fall for the sublime. And this is what
happens with images: The story that they tell doesn’t need to
be fact-checked, it is there already, a solid block of reality.

It was this ability for falsification what non-objective painting

at the turn of the century aimed to correct. Before, that is, it
was co-opted by mysticism and well, fascism too (to be
disowned shortly thereafter). In the same way that later in the
century, after American abstract expressionism, the radical
language of abstraction was co-opted by the gallery system,
and became today identical with the aesthetics of wealth,
hanging in iconic buildings by Zaha Hadid and Rem
Koolhaas, as a loud and proud smirk of the reckless
inequality. And it is perhaps here that the history of
abstraction breaks completely, and the seeds of suspicion
grew among the connoisseurs. But scholarship was in no
position to argue with capitalism. At the end of this food
chain we encounter the infamous American zombie
formalism, but what if it were possible to reach that same
state of conceptual precariousness without the debauchery?
There’s so little that we know for example about the history of
painting in the Soviet Union beyond the Cold War polarities
of socialist realism and non-conformism. Admittedly, a lot of
these abstract painters were not very good, but they had been
expelled from the Western canon before they had enough time
to be in it. Malevich was still ours, though.

During the trips I made to Omsk (a city in central Siberia) in

2016, I never managed to meet Damir Muratov, but even so, it
wasn’t difficult to tell the degree to which Siberia had been
colonized in a classic sense: Infinite poverty encircling the
city from all sides and a few good white people having fun.
The self-taught artist and Siberian cultural icon, introduced us
this year to his rather well-humored resistance: ‘United States
of Siberia’. In the same way that Barnard ‘abstracted’ the
violent history of the American conquest into an aesthetic
trope, perhaps Muratov trivialized the violence of the state to
a degree that it is made understandable; reducing the
unspeakable to, precisely, words. How difficult can it be, one
would want to think. But this is at the heart of the postmodern
malaise; it is clarity of vision what has become the most
difficult, because what is a vision anyway? Our dependency
on images, so profoundly rooted in our Greco-Roman cultural
past, has made us, in a way, incapable of processing the
information that we ourselves produce. Almost funny, from
the perspective of (the very serious and white) art history that
someone like Muratov would have done such an incredible
job in paying tribute to the legacy of Malevich; a legacy from
which he was himself excluded – alongside most Russian
artists.
And this is the end point: The colonization of the
representational image by an impoverished Western (political)
imagination, has co-opted the notion of abstraction as a
dialectical other of figuration, and ultimately, as a dead form
– it stands still. The image of the world as a postcard has
become as ubiquitous and touristic as the presence of Western
power. Following from that, the rupture in tradition foreseen
since the 19th century – metaphysical, religious, political,
historical, philosophical – is a reality that we encounter on a
daily basis in the form of interrupted amnesia. In the Istanbul
of the 21st century, a perennial battlefield of conflicting
imaginaries, sounds and images from the past are bombarding
us constantly, yet their presence is not present; it operates less
as lived remembrance and more as a funerary march. And in
the art world, to expand on Friedlaender’s thoughts about
water, try to remember how many biennials and museum
exhibitions have turned to the notion of a water as metaphor,
almost disingenuously oblivious of the degree to which water,
an almost absolute condition-state, can never serve as a
metaphor, except alas, to destroy metaphor and therefore,
annihilate language and the power of art to communicate.

After diving down to the depths of the Tongue of the Ocean in

the Bahamas, Bilge Friedlaender writes, “When I experienced
this, I went through a great transformation; there was a change
in my perception of space. When I returned home with the
influence of this I cast everything aside, I engaged in an effort
to invent painting again and made paintings that were not
paintings. I made paintings depicting water, that is to say,
depicting the spacelessness of space.” Spacelessness? The
idea that there is no space and therefore no boundary, implies
immediately a non-Euclidean principle: The non-parallelism
of infinite straight lines. In this qualitative and boundless
space, similar to our current model of the universe, it is
necessary for space to be produced by our being inside of it.
In 1922, when modern astronomers abolished a number of
ancient constellations from the star map, and adopted the
modern list of 88 constellations, something truly incredible
took place: On the one hand, they abolished something that
had never actually existed in space (they were human
constructions, mythologems) but on the other hand, its
theoretical existence had animated centuries of sailing
navigation.

And that is the nature of spaceless space: It grows and

expands – or decays – only as the result of conflicting
relations between the many heterogeneous realms in which
we simultaneously exist. And it is the active and ever-
evolving memory of those transformations what we call
‘abstract’, an indivisible but multiple whole. Alexandra
Paperno, the Russian painter that depicted all the abolished
constellations and set them on wooden panels in a church on
the mountains of the Caucasus, and who has spent the last
decade and a half looking at Soviet architecture and painting
not objects but the void spaces these objects once occupied
and the traces these voids have left in our sensible world,
would agree with what I think is, the central tenet in all of
Friedlaender’s work: “I want everything in my work to be
important. If there’s a shadow, that shadow is just as
important as the lines I paint. If there’s a line, that line should
be an absolutely perfect line. A line wouldn’t exist if we were
not people. The whole thing is a fiction. What we are trying to
communicate through fiction is reality.”
Arie Amaya-Akkermans
Heybeliada, September 2017
CONVERSATIONS
1 KIRUSHA
2 BARABANOV
3 PAPERNO
4 MURATOV
5 ROZHIN (FILE)
6 EDA (FILE)
7 DEVRAN
8 DEVRAN
AMBA (FILE) 9a 9b 9c 9d
OLSCHBAUR 10a 10b
BARNARD 11a 11b
CAVDAR 12
HALA (FILE) 13
KEVIN 14a 14b 14c
BILGE 15
BILGE 16
Fragments from Bilge Friedlaender’s notebooks

July 15 1973
 
Out of the sea came a woman
Wanted to be self-contained
Like a drop of water
Wanted to be a unit
Life generating, through the powers of creation
Water was the giver
Water will be taken
Water clear, crystal blue
-----//----
idea:
HORIZON
SINGLENESS 
CENTEREDNESS 
LINEAR
OPEN SPACE
CLEAR SPACE
WEIGHLESSNESS
LIFE RELATED COLORS
BLUE _ WATER
EARTH COLORS_
MAYBE GREEN
Materials:
ROPE cotton, LINEN, Nylon,
CANVAS cotton, LINEN
pencil, line.
\ 

January 10 1975
Grey is life’s density. In it grows small bursts of light, like the
stars in the sky. Each burst is part of one’s vision. Being alone
is listening to those bursts. Hearing one’s mind and body
respond to stimuli.
 
A shell, spiral in the middle - Spiral jetty - in the middle of
Salt Lake City - a spiral by depositing earth. The spiral of the
shell, A spiral made with the deposit of time. How to
understand the magic of the spiral and reach its essence is
Vision - Vision is deposited of one’s experience in time.
 
Once this vision is developed, every small contact with the
world is charged with excitement.
 
Rain - ////////////////// 
////////////////////////// 
////////////////////////
////////////////////////
////////////////////////
 Falls - Changes direction with the wind -
 
Grey density of the atmosphere holds the light of the rain.
 
- I love the world -

Doublespeak

notes on the afterlife / afterlives

I don’t like talking about origins because I don’t know where
anything comes from, at least anything that is not matter.
When I am listening, or walking, or talking to someone, I pick
out their words and I save them. Sometimes in the language
that I heard before all else, sometimes words i have searched
for in my mother tongue, locating themselves in English or
French. A notebook full of written words I want to say: seeps,
salt, susuz : without water, I blush, karadut : mulberry,
distance : uzaklık. My uzaklık belongs to a simple intention.
a’dan b’ye olan uzaklik : the distance from point a to point b.
Changing, unstable; the word meant more to me in english. It
multiplies and scatters. It’s a physical space or inside the
mind. Or between hearts. There’s a deadly distance. With
Hikmet, my uzaklık reappeared.

13 Kasım 1945

Kara haberler geliyor uzaktaki şehrimden :

namuslu, çalışkan, fakir insanların şehri —
sahici İstanbulum,
sevgilim, senin mekânın olan
ve nereye sürülsem, hangi hapiste yatsam
sırtı mda, torbamın içinde
götürdüğüm
ve evlât acısı gibi yüreğimde,
senin hayalin gibi gözlerimde taşıdığım
şehir...

13 November 1945

Black news coming from my distanced city

the city of honest, labored, poor people —
my genuine Istanbul,
my love, that which is your place
and wherever I am driven out to, whichever prison I am in
which on my back, in
my sack I carry
and like the pain for a lost child in
my heart,
the city I bear in my eyes like a
dream of you…

All these things I have loved all this time, it seems, and yet
never knew. I had not known Nazim the prisoner. Nazim the
lover. Only a name, Nazim Hikmet, one of our poets, here in
Istanbul. He had slipped away in between all those other
words; who those words belonged to I could never remember.
My city, where I was born and raised, where my mother and
father were born and raised, where I lived for seventeen years,
fourteen years at the same school with the same seventy
people. A stranger in a strange place, but who still doesn’t
belong anywhere else. My city, eight thousand kilometers
away from me, at five thousand miles distance; I’m sitting in
class and a stranger writes Ataturk on the board. We’re
talking about Turkey in the 20th century as I set up my
presentation on Hikmet. No one knew who he was. We had
just met too, in a way, Nazim and I. Two strangers, now side
by side. Hikmet was sentenced to twenty eight years in prison
in 1938. After twelve years, he went to Russia. He was exiled,
his nationality revoked. He was sent away, but his lover left
behind. Piraye. The love I know from his hour 21-22 poems,
which he wrote in prison. One of many who were silenced,
but one who managed to scream. I share the scream with my
class. I share my uzaklık. His uzaklık. Strange to encounter
his afterlife, him in translation. “All purposeful manifestations
life, including their very purposiveness, in the final analysis
have their end not in life, but in the expression of its nature, in
the representation of its significance. Languages are not
strangers to one another, but are interrelated in what they want
to express.”

I silently read his poem On Living, in English. Living is no

laughing matter:
you must live with great seriousness
like a squirrel
My mother taught me to live sincap gibi {like a squirrel}; to
take life lightly, but living seriously, amorously, sımsıkı
tutunarak {holding on tightly}. I remembered, from the echo
of the original,1 Hikmet’s words that were with me at a
distance. They multiply. I multiply. Questions multiply. The
whole class asks me, who is Ataturk. They don’t know the
one whose face hung next to the clock in every classroom.
Every monday morning, every friday before class is
dismissed, the face projected upon the giant blazing turkish
flag, as we sang the national anthem. Ataturk and with him,
fake nostalgia. I am afraid to speak of him now, of this man or
god, but I know their mind is untouched, Ataturk just a name.
So I speak. I tell them of how poisonously my people cling to
him, how they transformed this figure of him into a
euphemism for fascism. How thoughtlessly we praise the past,
and think it can resurrect in the present. What a narcissistic
view of history, textbooks full of instruction without vitality, 2
so vacant. It is against this void that I began searching. It was
like a survival instinct. A defense. What I believed my
language obscured, or didn’t allow me to know, I tried to find
in English. Already in the 20th century when the modern
Turkish alphabet was introduced, leaving behind the form of
the Arabic script, English was being taught as a second
language in schools. It had already invaded who I was going
1 The Task of the Translator, Walter Benjamin
2 On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, Nietzsche
to be, before I was born. A problem of unwritten genealogy.
(genealogy. a word nietzsche taught me. i word i needed.)
Because in istanbul, in my classrooms, yesterday and today
were always forgotten, history was never found in poetry, in
individuals, in honest words. So the history of my birthplace,
became my mother’s childhood. She grew up in the seventies,
she would play on the streets for hours with her brother and
his friends. I look at a black and white photograph of her and
my uncle, they’re no older than ten, their hair the same boy
cut. They are running in a field with a ball. I never played on
the streets of my neighborhood, with kids of my
neighborhood. It was never safe.

Someone asks me about the present. Still, it’s never safe. The
vicious nostalgia is blinding, the fields are gone, there are no
children. I suddenly remember the little boy, in between the
sadness of forgetting him. Only five, he goes out to get bread
for his family. A tear gas canister takes his life. Only two
years ago. I tell them of the Gezi Park protests. Three years
ago, the restless turkish youth began to peacefully rebel
against those who took away their freedom, their art, their
voice. There is so much more, but I must simplify. They
wrote, and they sang, and they shared with each other. But
words are dangerous. Many lost their lives as the police, our
new military, came. Vatan hainleri (Nation traitors).
Journalists and poets, kids, college students, people passing
by, buying bread. Killed or imprisoned. All social media was
blocked. All communication forbidden. News channels went
black. A terrifying darkness. A darkness that was already
everywhere, but one I hadn’t seen, one I was distanced from. I
know Hikmet, his afterlife, was there with those dying on the
streets. They were charged with the same intention, the same
feeling of exile, of injustice — because it is so dangerous to
write. And so, I wanted to tell them, as they watched me,
puzzled, with Hikmet began a yearning for the language that
thought me, my first signs. a drive to uncover fragments,
doubles, associations and so,

to recover the skin that was peeled off:

i am a kid
and the skin of a peach
fuzzy and foreign
is too strange on my tongue.
impatient
i skin the peach

“But you don’t sound turkish” say countless voices.

But what is a textureless peach. What is it to sound turkish, or

to look turkish, or to feel turkish. Is it the “r” that rolls too
strongly, the “t” that is a touch sharper, the “o” that is not
round enough. Hatirlamak,

to remember, its “t” carves itself on the tongue and then

immediately pours into the that rolling “r,” they hiss together
as they are lost in the “l” and solidified with that final “k.”
Mor, purple, it’s “o” like a ring of smoke, slightly imperfect,
sounds like an impatient “more.” I miss my voice, so i get lost
thinking of it. The violets in my garden, circles that
caterpillars bit in them, come to my mind. What is it inside of
me upon which english intrudes. And how. In the garden, next
to the violets, my father sits in his green chair. Legs crossed.
Yaz kokuyor [it smells like summer]. His beloved season, my
father, a boy in the sun. He plays for me “My Heart Belongs
to Daddy” and sings along with Eartha Kitt. We dance on the
grass, my little hand the size of his thumb. An indescribable
innocence, like honey melting in warm milk. This is how
English seeped into thoughts. I am drinking warm milk with
sugar, enveloped in my mother’s bed, as she reads Where the
Wild Things Are to me in English. As she did every night. My
uncle, who lived in Los Angeles at the time, would bring us
suitcases filled with books. Shell Silverstein’s Falling Up and
The Giving Tree, The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane
by Kate DiCamillo, James and the Giant Peach, and The Little
Prince. One night i rose up straight still asleep, turned and
pointed to her: “Be still!” Do i dream in and with language,
then? Was I even dreaming? I don’t remember. In all of us I
think there is this urge to say certain things, to speak certain
words. And we carry them with us, like ants swarming in and
around our body, all these little particles waiting to escape.
Maybe then, when our guards are down they speak us.

I came across an interview of Eartha Kitt once, not too long

ago. She is asked, “Isn’t love a union between two people? Or
does Eartha, fall in love with herself?” Eartha lets out that
divine laugh, long, devilish and sublime. “Yes. I fall in love
with myself, and I want someone to share it with me. I want
someone to share me, with me.” Eartha, mother, one of many
who exist only as fragments of me. Eartha, carved in my
memory. She, who slips back into existence from time to
time, as if knowing when to appear. I put on The Best of:
Eartha Kitt. “Apres Moi” begins to play. With a crackle,
We’ve been friends for a long long time, we’ve shared again
and again; we like the same clothes and we like the same
wine… I had bought the record sometime ago somewhere. I
had listened to it quite a few times since. I don’t notice the
passing songs. My guard is down. Unfamiliar words with
familiar sounds capture me. “Üşküdar'a gider iken…” (On the
way to Uskudar) Eartha sings, with the most charming of
errors; she utters my beloved “ş” instead of “s”. Hypnotized
almost, I sit and listen to that turkish ballad, the one we had to
sing and play on the guitar when I was eleven in music class.
Her words are turkish, yet their manner is translated, revived.
Now nineteen, she speaks to me, sings to me my “Turkish
Tale.” The tale of a nineteenth century Turkish woman in love
with her much younger clerk. He is hers, and she, his.
“Kâtibimi arar iken yanımda buldum” (As I was looking for
him, I found him beside me).

I wake up in a strange place. I am Max. Sitting on my white

carpet in my living room in West Philadelphia. Orman degil.
My walls become a forest. I do not know under whose sky I
am. But my mother has left soup on the table. I breathe in the
displacement. Even as I write now, I feel I am imitating an
intimacy I can’t truly grasp. It’s fragmented. i caught myself
divided, thinking in english, and something shifted. I sing,
soundless, with the afterlife of her voice, I sit with her ghost
figure scattered in my mind, accepting the mystery. In
between languages, I have come to accept uncertainty,
distance, susuzluk (thirst).

Keyla Çavdar

Representation as Erasure

To return to Istanbul at intervals is to be disoriented,

repeatedly, by the disappearance of chunks of memory from
corresponding reality. Inevitably patches of a sidewalk, a
road, a square, a hillside of buildings on which one previously
walked have been disemboweled to make way for new
versions of themselves. Known ground becomes, at least
briefly, unrecognizable, and the routine illusion that one’s
grip on the present is total and unassailable comes undone.
Through its expansive inconclusiveness, and the
voraciousness with which it endlessly devours and reforms
itself, Istanbul forces a reckoning with the precariousness of
perception.

This recurring sense of one’s reality failing is driven by the

productive chaos of constructioncity’s lucrative chaos—that
is, theits relentless production of rubble to profit from its
reconstruction—that resembles is a war economy by other
means. It is a fitting hybrid for a mega-polis that straddles not
only the literal divide between Europe and Asia but also a
crucial—and for some excruciating—joint in the neoliberal
economy. In this cartography, peace and prosperity, the twin
“pillars” of democracy, face down an archipelago of
devastated cities extending from the Levant into North Africa
and Asia. (Ironically, as the threshold of these cratered zones,
Turkey also profits as a kind of proxy Arabia for American
Western tourists for whom it is or might as well be “The
Middle East”.)

As a border between intact and pulverized cities, Istanbul

occupies—or inhabits, or survives—a symbiotic juncture in
the logistics of memory and forgetting, or the abstraction of
history into styles of erasure. Despite and probably because of
[the state’s] strenuous efforts to inscribe it with a stable
monolithic victory, it remains a flux of conflicting, competing
claims on the past and future. This very inability to stabilize
representation hold open a space of unrequited possibility
where access to reality cannot be entirely foreclosed.

Manhattan, on the other hand, rises as a monument to a kind

of productive amnesia, not so much the end as the sheer
erasure of history. This absence is partly material, as the dales
of Central Park efface all trace of the communities, native and
settler, that they displaced, and partly linguistic, with terms
like “civic improvement” and “urban renewal” euphemizing
evictions,. But yet it is also aspirational, modeling a
technocratic transcendentalism. that fuses the hubris of
optimism and the optimism of hubris. The Manhattan skyline
projects a blank sublimity that emulates in steel the
vertiginous naturalness of the Grand Canyon. And as this
projection, endlessly reproduced and broadcast, New York
CityYC hypostasizes its own airbrushed brand image as
natural, inevitable and changeless. Of course, the promise of
this fictional city is betrayed by the real city’s aging
dysfunctional infrastructure; but the two have long been
diverging towards separate futures, with the former remaining
impervious to the latter.

Caught between the impossibility of the fantasy city and the

frustrations of its actual decay, New Yorkers lean into the
prosthesis of the app economy epitomized by Seamless: that
life is better the fewer human interactions one is forced into.
In the process, society—as the negotiation of basic needs like
eating, cleaning, and mating--is replaced with a series of
online transactions in which apps prescript even the text
messages of delivery men: “Hello! This is
Darnel/Daquan/Kareem/Luis and I’ll be arriving at your
location shortly. Track us here:”

Meanwhile, back in Istanbul, those of us not forced to play

mechanical Turkswe act play the role of the spectator with a
largely artificial innocence. With an optimism bordering on
amnesia, Americans presume their entitlement to pursue not
only happiness but fulfillment in desiring “to change the
world”—with no sense of irony, caution or dread, considering
how their predecessors’ efforts went. This style of aspiration
operates as a form of unwitting impunity wherein one strives
to “find oneself” by saving a lost and burning world. But any
actual burning signifies—and sanctifies--the spectral allure of
the future world waiting to be realized, the romance of the
blank slate or canvas, and of the (neo-)liberal imagination as
blank check. The latter is drawn from the original colonial
account: that really there is no one else here to account for,
and there never was.

The War on Terror has updated that Puritan dream for the
twenty-first century, outsourced and increasingly privatized
for a global economy. To save Baghdad, Mosul and Raqqa it
has been necessary first to destroy them. One can still hear, in
the ebullient coverage of these campaigns and their collateral
damage, the righteous wonder of William Bradford, the
governor of Plymouth, concluding in 1636 after settlers
burned alive an entire village of Pequot Indians, leaving them
“thus frying in the fire,” that “the victory seemed a sweet
sacrifice”. Indeed, from this vantage point, the more pockets
of violent desolation are created, the stronger the imperative
to minister to them.

As these wars hum along, it is exactly their abstract nemesis

called “Terror”, terror abstracted from historical experience
into kind of boundless negative potential, that obviates any
need to account for the actual logistics and expenditures on
which it runs. Never mind the trillions of dollars—a
generation’s worth--of exported and mislaid weaponry. Like
evil, this abstract terror is an ideological and probably infinite
problem. It forms a future horizon, an inverse Manifest
Destiny gone viral.

So the zones of rubble are indeed remaining and expanding,

while terror enjoys the same liquidity and mobility as global
capital. For the American consumer, this media landscape
functions as both a virtual Green Zone-as-panopticon and a
fractal green screen for the projection of any depravity. See
recent CNN segments that frame the destruction of east
Aleppo as exotic drive-by spectacle, wholly abstracted from
the forces that leveled it not years but mere months previous.
“I mean just look at this...look how destroyed this area
is...completely flattened,” marvels the reporter, as remaining
residents run after handouts of bread.

This framing effects a different kind of flattening, of pain into

an exotic spectacle. Commenting on how their works after the
Lebanese civil war report on “the invisible, the repressed”,
Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige assert that, “In the
torment afflicting the region, the media show faces reduced to
a function, a form of reaction: the victim...without a real
story...a status...that we deplore without really seeing. In our
part of the world we have, in a way, lost our faces.”

But this loss is only part of the balance sheet. In the economy
of the War on Terror, the subtraction of pain from the
representation of faces—that is, their abstraction from history
—formalizes a sanitized imaginary of war that also elides any
account of its profit mechanisms or profiteers. In this mining
and refining of damage, history becomes a semi-toxic
byproduct to be disposed of one way or another. History, that
is, as the memory of suffering; and there is no history without
this memory.

Any regime wants to keep only one memory of suffering

alive: that of its own partisans. And as for the others: with
access to their history—the narration of memory—cut off,
contestation of reality in real terms is impossible. Memory
then is transposed into myth, the myth of the martyr-victim.
But a battle of myths is not susceptible to parlay; it can only
be resolved by forceful eradication of one or the other side.
This is one phantasm haunting peoples left in place when the
borders of the Ottoman empire were erased, who a century on
are (still) being subjected to a gerrymandering of the
gerrymandering.

I encountered it, this hovering irresolution, on my last visit to

Istanbul, when I bought a thick Mario Levi novel, “Istanbul
Was a Fairytale”, only to lose interest when I realized it was
fiction. I did not want to negotiate anymore gap between
imagination and reality; I did not feel like navigating any
more uncertainty or suspense. I carried it back tobrought it
back with me my hostel and looked for a shelf to leave it on.
Onur, the hostel manager, the hostel manager, glanced at it
with surprise. For him it opened up a space to speak to
something other than the needs of tourists.

“Istanbul is all suffering,” he declared. “Every group—Jews,

Armenians, Kurds, Syrians—doesn’t matter who. Here it’s all
suffering. The only nice thing is the views of the water,
they’re pretty.”

“Yes,” I said, thinking of Aleppo, where the night concierge

was from, and the schizophrenia of its simultaneous victory
and defeat. The pictures of Christmas trees that flooded
Twitter from western Aleppo as residents of the east were
executed, arrested, deported. As if caroling on one side of the
city could negate weeping on the other. Then I also thought of
Istanbul and its contradictions whose survival contests and
thus preserves, by their sheer irreconcilability, reality as a
plural. “But it’s still here.”

Jennifer Mackenzie
 Acknowledgements

The Curator of the Exhibition would like to thank the people

that contributed to this exhibition either through their support,
ideas, conversations throughout the years, critical comments
or intensive labor.

Karoly Aliotti, Kerem Ozan Bayraktar, Paula Bossa, Katie

Bradshaw, Hera Büyüktaşçıyan, Aloş Çavdar, Esengül Çelik,
Barış Doğrusöz, Mira Friedlaender, Pırıl Güleşçi Arıkonmaz,
Rana Jabbour, Snejana Krasteva, Jennifer Mackenzie, Roxana
Marcoci, Devran Mursaloğlu, Ding Musa, Alexandra
Paperno, November Paynter, Mari Spirito, Alfred Tarazi, Hale
Tenger, Serra Toplusoy, Hrag Vartanian, Dilek Winchester,
Alexander Zhouravlev, Roman Zubrilov.

The lenders of the works in the exhibition:

11/12 Gallery (Moscow), Agial Art Gallery (Beirut), Arie

Amaya-Akkermans (Moscow/Istanbul), The Estate of Bilge
Friedlaender (New York), Carbon 12 (Dubai), Iragui Gallery
(Moscow), Kevin Finklea (Philadelphia), Katherina Olschbaur
(Vienna), Osnova Gallery (Moscow), Sergey Rozhin
(Moscow).