An interview with Özlem Günyol and Mustafa Kunt on “SEPARATELYTOGETHER – letters, numbers, punctuation and other signs” Nilüfer Şaşmazer

The project “SEPARATELYTOGETHER”, which you have realized for Yanköşe, presents the most recent version of the Constitution as an abstract, complex pattern. This is a work with a highly conceptual approach: what was your departure point during the preparation process?

“SEPARATELYTOGETHER” is the second public space project we have realized in Turkey. The first was a work we realized on Yüksel Street in Ankara, in 2011. Titled “Persuasion Exercises”, this work had been composed of poses given by political party leaders for photographs used on propaganda posters during the 2011 election period. The project had been installed on a billboard on Yüksel Street before the elections, and had been removed immediately after the elections. “Persuasion Exercises” is different compared to “SEPARATELYTOGETHER” since it emphasizes a humorous language that is much more direct and can be understood much faster, but the point that inspired us for both works is the same. When you acquire the right to say something in public space, this means carrying out an intervention in a space that belongs to all of us. Thus, the desire to say something on a matter that has a direct impact on all of us inevitably prevails. The project “SEPARATELYTOGETHER” was designed a few months after the 16 April 2017 referendum. The work contains the current text of the Constitution in its entirety.

The letters, numbers and punctuation marks in the text of the Constitution meet, in this work, only with signs similar to themselves, and they all turn into lines that extend out along different axes. In other words, in a sense, by fragmenting the entire content of the Constitution, you render it meaningless, but it also becomes pregnant with new meaning. So, does this work involve a call to the viewer, proclaiming, “Make your own sentence, create your own meaning”?

Yes, the work separates all the elements used in the text of the Constitution, and then brings every element together with those similar to itself, thus dissolving the text. However, the elements that are brought together with those similar to themselves remain the same in number. Therefore, the text of the Constitution continues to stand before our eyes with all its potential. Elements separated from the text lose their meaning, and as they lose their meaning, they become independent. From the moment that they gain their independence, they open a space for new sentences that may be formed by using them. “SEPARATELYTOGETHER” makes a visual proposal for the Constitution to become a form that holds us together with all our differences.

Constitutions are texts that ensure the basic rights and freedoms of individuals; from this viewpoint, a political perspective, or stance regarding the system in Turkey can also be sensed in the work. After all, your previous works, too, treat interrelated concepts and phenomena such as individual and collective belonging, political system and the construction of identity, language and symbols. Could we say that “SEPARATELYTOGETHER” is content-wise close to “Right” (2015) which superimposed the pages featuring the word “right” from the Constitution to render the whole illegible, and “Fresh Like the First Day” (2011) where you made separate books from all letters in the 1982 Constitution, and visually close to “Constitutive Lines” (2015) which you formed by superimposing the outlines of national flags?

“Fresh Like the First Day” is a work we created after the 2010 referendum. Like the work “SEPARATELYTOGETHER”, it separates all the elements that make up the Constitution from each other. However, in contrast to “SEPARATELYTOGETHER”, here, the elements do not desert their position in the text, instead, they retain their places and are divided into 53 books. In the A book there are only ‘a’s, in the 5 book there are only ‘5’s, and in the full stop book, there are only full stops. The work refers to our time at primary school when we first come across letters, numbers and punctuation marks, and renders the text open to potential constructs. Whereas the work “Right”, brings together all the “right”s in the text of the Constitution, pushes the rest of the text into the background, and underlines the fact that the primary task of the Constitution is to secure the basic rights and freedoms of individuals.

Both works were created during periods when there were debates over changes to the text of the Constitution. However, if we take a closer look, the work we created in 2011, “Fresh Like The First Day” is a more optimistic work. “Right”, a work we realized in 2015, reveals that concerns have increased. As for the elements that make up the text for “SEPARATELYTOGETHER” they are lined up after they have deserted their original places in the text, are chaotically regrouped to create a moment of incoherence. Although the work “Constitutive Lines” may seem visually close to “SEPARATELYTOGETHER”, the random grouping in “SEPARATELYTOGETHER” appears as order in “Constitutive Lines”.

The fact that this work is placed in a public space, and that it borrows its content from the Constitution also recalls the social contract. Would it be accurate to say that this work focuses on social consensus? And since it is installed in public space, is it different than your other works which focus on the relationship between the individual and the state?

Yes, it would be more accurate to say that this work focuses on social consensus. The Constitution is a text that concerns all of us. The new Constitution may have been approved with 51% of the vote, but we think that it should be our most natural right to demand a text that will ensure social consensus on a matter that will have an impact on 100% of us. The fact that the work will be exhibited in public space means that anyone who passes by will enter into a dialogue with the work, whether positive or negative. In this sense, the work is different from the works we have shown indoors, since it will communicate with many more people.

On the other hand, slicing up the Constitution also means to distort the social contract (once again, but in order, perhaps, to re-establish it in different ways). In this sense, could we suggest that your work also has an anarchistic dimension?

It is true that the work transmits the text of the Constitution onto a chaotic platform, however, one must not forget that “SEPARATELYTOGETHER” also potentially retains the currently effective text of the Constitution. We could say that our work searches for an answer to the question, “How can we create a new proposal from a thing that already exists?” In this sense, the work conveys the Constitution into the visual field, and transforms it by transferring it into another language. What we are trying to do here is to address the possibility of the text itself evolving into something more comprehensive, despite itself.

Although it has a deconstructionist aspect, the work, as its name also reveals, gestures towards the state of differences existing together; in fact, by indicating both an individual and collective stance, makes a call for the possibility of existing together, separately. When I think about this, I am also reminded of the previous work hosted at Yanköşe: Nermin Er’s work, too, emphasized living together. Her work focused more on the idea of people and animals living together on the scale of the city, while your work seems to treat the coexistence of people from a more abstract, intellectual and political perspective. In this sense, do you think it is possible to look at these works as different interpretations of the same concept?

“SEPARATELYTOGETHER” is not only a call to co-exist with all our differences, but it also emphasizes the impossibility of building a meaningful sentence without these differences. Our differences are revealed only when we are together, and that is when they assume meaning. In both Nermin’s work and ours, there is a focus on the right to life of those who are different to us, and a proposal to build a life together.

If we look at the relationship of the work with the space it is located in, we see that the two-dimensionality in its nature, through a certain kind of illusion, may be perceived as three-dimensionality. On the other hand, there is a cyclical impasse: From a distance, the work appears completely indecipherable, and complex; as you approach, you think that some meaning may be derived from familiar letters and signs; however, when you come even closer to the work, you understand that the letters and signs have not been arranged in a meaningful manner.

The incomprehensibility which you have referred to as a cyclical impasse in this context is based in the condition of something being both itself, and something else at the same moment. This is part of our work method. If you were to ask us, from a distance, the work is perceived as an abstract pattern, as you approach the work, you can make out that the lines are made up of letters, punctuation and other signs. As the viewers approach further, a signpost featuring the title of, and brief information about the work, help as a key. We could put it like this: The work presents itself in a few different ways to viewers that enter into a relationship with it from a distance, from close up, and from a very small distance.

Grand narratives like nation, flag and language do not only belong to Turkey, of course. You have previously applied the method of dismantling the constituent elements of these narratives also in works you have produced in Germany, where you have lived for a long time. In a work titled “Spread the Word” dated 2012, you removed certain words from the discourses of political parties, placed them in separate boxes, and invited the viewer to select the words she or he will use to build their own sentences from these boxes, and place them in a confetti gun. This work, along with others, remind me of the concept of the open work. Could we say that in your works, which you create in a fragmented structure, you invite the viewer, too, to interpret the work, and offer the viewer a certain amount of autonomy for the construction of meaning?

“Spread the Word” is a project that contains discursive elements used in the propaganda posters of political parties posted in public space during election periods in Germany. The work takes all the words used in these elements without discrimination and presents them in alphabetic order. In this way, every word gains its own independent position. However, since the work uses all the words that make up the discourse as they are, the index that emerges continues to remain linked to the discourse used in the poster. The condition we spoke of before exists here as well. The work tries to use the full potential of the thing it takes up (here, this is the discourses of political parties) to transform it into something else. In this sense, it is similar to “SEPARATELYTOGETHER”.

“Spread the Word” is an interactive project that is completed with the participation of the viewer. The work is made up of three parts: An index featuring words used in the discourses of political parties, thousands of small-scale prints of every single word in the index, and a confetti gun. The work could briefly be described as follows: The work invites the viewer to form her or his own discourse by using the words in the index. Every participant responding to the invitation forms her or his own discourse with the words she or he chooses from the index. Then she or he writes the discourse on two confetti guns, and fills both guns with the small-scale prints of the words he or she has used. While one of the guns that contains the new discourse is left beside the work, the other gun departs from the space with the viewer. In this way, words brought in from the public space are once again dispersed in the outside world, this time in the guise of different discourses.

As you also stated in your question, many of our works that have been constructed in a fragmentary manner, seek to open a space for the viewer to construct new meaning. And perhaps this should not be reduced solely to fragmentary works. Sometimes with the direct involvement of the audience as in “Spread the Word”, sometimes through a physical experience, as in “Hemzemin” a work we installed on a pavement in Dortmund, by melting a 12-metre-tall flag pole to transform it into a metal plate with a height of approximately 2 cm, and sometimes, as in “SEPARATELYTOGETHER” through a visual, aesthetic language, the works seek to open up a space for the viewer to form her or his own construction of meaning.

If you ask me, this work will open a significant space in the centre of Istanbul, not only with its visuality, but also with the debate it initiates, and the proposal it makes. Thank you very much, and congratulations!

Laudatio von Holger Kube Ventura anlässlich der Ausstellungseröffnung „Beyond the Horizon“ von Özlem Günyol & Mustafa Kunt – Preisträger 2017 des „HAP-Grieshaber-Preis der VG Bild-Kunst“ – im Projektraum des Deutschen Künstlerbund, Berlin, 5. September 2017

In der hier zu eröffnenden Ausstellung zeigen Özlem Günyol und Mustafa Kunt fünf Werke, die für das Œuvre des türkischstämmigen Duos im Zusammenspiel repräsentativ sind. Bei allen erkennt man jeweils umfangreiche künstlerische Arbeitsprozesse, die in klar strukturierte Bildformen münden, dem Auge bei näherer Betrachtung viel zu bieten haben und insofern zunächst „schön“ zu sein scheinen. So hat bei dem heute erstmals gezeigtem Werk „Toward the Horizon“ das wochenlange, stoische Auftragen einzelner, gerader, schwarzer Linien mit dem Tuschestift dazu geführt, dass schließlich eine monumentale, tiefdunkle Fläche entstanden ist, deren Dichte nun so magisch anzieht. Auch bei dem Objekt auf dem Sockel ist zu erkennen, dass es sich eben nicht bloß um ein industriell hergestelltes Seil handelt, sondern um ein großes Stück Stoff, dass offenbar so lange gedreht und gewrungen wurde, bis es sich von der Fläche in eine Linie verwandelte. Man kann die hinein gebrachte Energie, die Anspannung darin förmlich spüren. Beide Arbeiten sind zeitaufwändig handgemacht, ihr minimalistisches Herstellungsprinzip ist leicht zu verstehen und umso mehr bereitet es daher ästhetischen Genuss, die ins Extreme getriebenen Wiederholungen sinnlich nachzuvollziehen und dabei nach material- oder handlungsspezifischen Abweichungen zu suchen.
Sobald man aber die angebotenen Informationen zu den Werken liest, verändert sich dieser erste Eindruck. Wir erfahren, dass für “Toward the Horizon” genau 188.333 Linien in der Länge von 60 cm gezogen wurden, dass 60 Zentimeter die durchschnittliche Schrittlänge eines Gehenden ist, dass die Gesamtlänge aller Linien 113 Kilometer ergeben und dass dies die kürzeste Entfernung zwischen Tunesien und Italien sei. Der „Weg zum Horizont“, von Afrika nach Europa – unweigerlich werden durch solche Hinweise die seit Jahren wiederkehrenden Schlagzeilen von Geflüchteten auf der italienischen Insel Lampedusa aufgerufen und auch die Zahlen Jener, die diese Reise nicht überleben. Das mühsame Aufzeichnen so vieler schwarzer Linien erscheint somit als ein Nachvollziehen solch einer Flucht, als ob die Schritte nach Europa gezählt werden, die zuletzt in einem undurchdringlichen Schwarz enden. Um diese über 188.000 Schritte tun zu können, müsste man allerdings wie Jesus über Genezareth gehen oder auf dem Meeresgrund zwischen Tunesien und Italien wandeln können. Handelt es sich bei dieser Arbeit vielleicht um ein Denkmal? Wie in anderen ihrer Schaubilder zu Flüchtlingsrouten kommen Günyol/Kunt hier zu einem Ergebnis, mit dem das Thema auf verschiedenen Bedeutungsebenen geradezu umzingelt wird.

Auch das Objekt auf dem Sockel verändert sich völlig, sobald die Information hinzu kommt, dass es sich bei dem zum Seil transformierten Stück Stoff um ein 22 Meter langes Demonstrations-Transparent mit der Aufschrift „… AND JUSTICE FOR ALL!“ handele. Auf einem derart großen Protestbanner wäre die fragmentierte Teilforderung „… und Gerechtigkeit für Alle!“ zwar sicher lautstark. Vielleicht aber bräuchte es eher ein handfesteres Werkzeug, um die Einlösung dieser Forderung tatsächlich mal herbei zu führen, etwa ein Seil – mit dem man zusammen ein Gefängnisgitter herausreißen, Jemanden fesseln oder wenigstens ein Tauziehen veranstalten könnte. Wem aber würde dies dann dienen? Verhöhnen die Künstler mit ihrem Transformationsobjekt zahnlose Demonstrationsfloskeln und fordern stattdessen zur konkreten Handlung auf? Ist es ein künstlerischer Vorschlag, um angesichts von Staatsgewalt mittels situationistischer Experimente im Debord’schen Sinne nach Wegen aus der Ohnmacht zu suchen? Oder wird etwa den Demonstranten der Strick angedroht? Jede Interpretation spiegelt hier die eigene Grundhaltung zu politischen Konflikten zwischen Hegemon und Opposition. Im Übrigen bleibt offen, ob dieses Transparent eigentlich jemals irgendwo gehangen hat, oder ob es wohlmöglich gar kein Readymade, sondern ein von den Künstlern eigens zum Zweck der Werkproduktion erschaffenes Artefakt ist. Sicher scheint nur, dass diese Arbeit 2010 entstanden ist, also in jenem Jahr, als der von Ministerpräsident Erdoğan vorgeschlagenen Justizreform im Rahmen des Verfassungsreferendums der Türkei zugestimmt wurde.

Einige Jahre später realisieren Günyol/Kunt eine Skulptur, die in ähnlicher Weise nach dem Potential und der Wehrhaftigkeit von friedlichem Protest fragt. Sie besteht aus Schleifen von NATO-Draht, dessen Klingen die Schallwellen von Rufen und Parolen darstellen, die bei den Protesten gegen die geplante Bebauung des dadurch berühmt gewordenen Gezi Parks in Istanbul zu hören waren. Die Künstler haben also Klänge des Protests in Klingen der „Selbstverteidigung“ – so der Titel dieser Arbeit – überführt. Wiederum werden dadurch sehr unterschiedliche Lesarten ermöglicht, die dann auch von einer (je nachdem) eher skeptischen oder eher optimistischen Haltung des Interpretierenden gegenüber zivilem Ungehorsam erzählen würden. So mag diese Skulptur einerseits für die Wehrhaftigkeit des Widerstands stehen und behaupten: Wer dessen Stimmen angreifen will, wird sich verletzen! Andererseits könnte diese Skulptur eine Militarisierung der Opposition anklagen, die nun offenbar ebenfalls Blutvergießen in Kauf nimmt. Wäre das noch „Selbstverteidigung“? In jedem Fall umschreibt die so betitelte Skulptur von Günyol/Kunt eine Eskalierung und es scheint daraus eine künstlerische Praxis zu sprechen, die ihren Platz in Oppositionsbewegungen sucht. Weder kennt sie diesen Platz bereits, noch hält sie sich für identisch mit oder völlig getrennt von konkreter Gegenwehr. Es ist eine politisch-künstlerische Praxis, die sich über die Stärken und Schwächen einer Engführung von Macht und Gegenmacht auf der Ebene von Repräsentationen sehr bewusst ist. Sie weiß um die Chancen und Risiken von Bildpolitiken, auf der Straße, im öffentlichen Raum, im medialen Raum und auch im elitären Schutzraum einer Kunstausstellung.

Özlem Günyol und Mustafa Kunt haben beide in Ankara Bildhauerei und Skulptur studiert und artikulieren ihre Ideen und Konzepte heute aber auch in den Medien Zeichnung, Grafik, Installation, Fotografie, Video, Klang und Performance. Ausnahmslos alle ihrer Arbeiten haben politische Bezüge. Viele beschäftigen sich mit staatlichen Repräsentationen, Herrschaftszeichen und Exekutivmitteln und versuchen diese zu dekonstruieren. Zu den wiederkehrenden Sujets gehören Nationalflaggen und Nationalhymnen, Monumente, Ehrenmäler, Prunksäulen, Sockel und Fahnenmaste, die Körpersprache von Wahlkämpfern, Methoden der Personenüberwachung und der Todesstrafe, der Euro und das reichste Prozent, die Festung Europa, Staatsgrenzen und Reisepässe, Migrationsrouten und Flüchtlingskatastrophen oder auch Grundlagentexte wie die UN-Menschenrechts-Charta.
An Letztere erinnert die 16-teilige Arbeit „That which remains…“, die ebenfalls eigens für diese Ausstellung entstanden ist. Auf jedem Blatt sind nur bei näherer Betrachtung zentrale Begriffe aus der Allgemeinen Erklärung der Menschenrechte von 1948 zu erkennen. Ihre Buchstaben bestehen aus Salz. Günyol/Kunt haben dieses Salz aus Meerwasser herauskristallisiert, das sie aus dem Ägäischen Meer mitgebracht hatten, genauer gesagt aus Dikili und Cesme in der Türkei, und aus Lesbos und Chios in Griechenland. Damit sind vier Hauptorte des so genannten Flüchtlings-Deals benannt: Die EU hat mit der Türkei vereinbart, alle seit März 2016 in Griechenland gestrandeten Flüchtlinge, die dort kein Asyl beantragen, in die Türkei zurückzuschicken und im Gegenzug für jeden von Griechenland in die Türkei abgeschobenen Syrer einen syrischen Flüchtling aus der Türkei aufzunehmen. Dieser Deal ignoriert zahlreiche Artikel der UN-Menschenrechts-Charta. Deren zentrale Werte-Begriffe kristallisieren Günyol/Kunt aus jenem Meerwasser heraus, durch das die Deportationen verlaufen.

Auch der gerahmte Druck „hak“ aus dem Jahr 2015 sucht nach einem Bild für die Essenz und reale Relevanz eines gesellschaftlichen Grundlagentextes. In diesem Fall geht es um die Verfassung der türkischen Republik. Die Künstler haben sich den Text dieser Verfassung vorgenommen und jedes Mal, wenn auf einer Seite das Wort “hak” – zu deutsch: „Recht“ – erscheint, diese dann so ausgerichtet, dass es im Mittelpunkt einer Fläche steht. Alle Seiten der Verfassung wurden auf diese Weise ausgerichtet, übereinander montiert und sodann auf einem Bogen gedruckt. Das Ergebnis ist die graphische Darstellung einer Verfassung, in der das „Recht“ immer im Zentrum steht, also das Wichtigste sei. Nur leider sind durch das Zentrierungsmanöver alle anderen Worte und Begriffe dieser Verfassung ausgelöscht worden: Es haben sich Balken gebildet, die an Zensurmaßnahmen erinnern. Das sture Pochen auf Recht ist also offenbar nicht ideal. Ist es vielleicht wenigstens schön?

Methoden des Überlagerns, Zentrierens und Übersetzens in andere Medien wenden die beiden Künstler öfters an. Zum Beispiel bei ihrem Sandwich-Druck aus Porträtfotos der 100 reichsten Personen der Welt, bei ihrer Sound-Installation aus allen Nationalhymnen, bei ihren Analysen von Wahlkampf-Parolen und Geldschein-Farbgebungen und bei ihrer Serie von Arbeiten zu Nationalflaggen. Zu Letzterer gehört die fünfte neue Arbeit von Günyol/Kunt in dieser Ausstellung, nämlich die Installation „Reds, Yellows & Blues”. Sie besteht aus drei bodennah aufgestellten Monitoren, die eigentlich nur eben diese drei Farben zeigen, beziehungsweise – wie es der Titel aus ungewöhnlichen Pluralformen schon andeutet – verschiedene Töne davon. Diese wurden aus den Nationalflaggen dieser Welt abgeleitet und wechseln auf den stummen Bildschirmen etwa alle 10 Sekunden. Offenkundig gibt es also nicht nur das eine Rot, Gelb und Blau – also jene Primärfarben der historischen Dreifarben-Theorie, aus denen alle anderen Farben gemischt werden können – sondern immer wieder neue Nachbarschaften im Kontinuum des Farbspektrums und neue potentielle Fusionen. Gemeint sind damit natürlich nationalstaatliche Identitäten. Der Titel eines berühmten Werkes von Barnett Newman fällt mir dazu ein: “Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue?” – und auch die Attacken, die es darauf gegeben hat.

Aus dem Œuvre von Özlem Günyol und Mustafa Kunt spricht, dass diese Konzeptkünstler anhand von Symbolen und Repräsentationen von Macht und Gegenmacht systematisch nach derem Wesen zu suchen scheinen. Es ist ihnen nicht zum Lachen zumute dabei. Sie arbeiten streng und ausdauernd, glauben an das politische Potential ästhetischer Erfahrung – und greifen an. Die von ihnen konzipierten künstlerischen Handlungen führen zu Werken, die ihrerseits zu Handlungsakten führen könnten, mit denen sich spezifische gesellschaftliche Formationen vielleicht überwinden ließen. Ihre Transformations-Kunstwerke sind Anschläge, Anstiftungen und Entgegnungen, die aber klugerweise keine unmissverständliche Position einnehmen. Denn nur so kann die Perspektive des Betrachters auf formal abstrahierte Informationen und Ereignisse ins Zentrum seiner Reflexion gelangen: Wie stehe ich nun zu dieser Ästhetisierung des Grauens der Zeitläufte? Spiegelt das Werk meine politische Passivität, oder ist es schon Teil eines Veränderungsprozesses? Die Kunst dieses Duos ist nicht wissend, nicht zynisch, polemisch oder anklagend, vielleicht etwas traurig, aber nie resigniert. Sie legt Finger in Wunden und fragt, wer von wo aus damit umgeht. Die im Kunstjargon allzu oft bemühte Floskel von der Suche nach neuen Sichtweisen passt hier also tatsächlich einmal. Und deswegen freue ich mich sehr, dass Özlem Günyol und Mustafa Kunt mit dem HAP-Grieshaber Preis 2017 gewürdigt und unterstützt werden.

Holger Kube Ventura’s laudatory speech on the occasion of the opening of the exhibition “Beyond the Horizon” by Özlem Günyol & Mustafa Kunt, winners of the 2017 “HAP-Grieshaber-Preis der VG Bild-Kunst,” in the Deutscher Künstlerbund project space, Berlin, September 5, 2017

The exhibition to be inaugurated here showcases five pieces by Özlem Günyol and Mustafa Kunt that are representative of the Turkish-born duo’s work. All of them were created by way of an extensive artistic working process resulting in clearly structured pictorial forms that have a lot to offer in a visual sense – our first impression of the works is that they are “beautiful.” In the piece “Toward the Horizon,” exhibited today for the first time, we bear witness to the weeks of the artists’ stoic application of single, straight black lines with an ink pen to create a monumental, deep-black surface. Its density exerts an almost magical pull on the viewer. It is easy to see that the object on the plinth, too, is not merely an industrially produced rope, but in fact a large piece of cloth that has been turned and twisted for so long it has transformed from a plane into a line. The energy and tension that have gone in to creating this form are fully tangible. Both pieces were handmade in a lengthy process and their Minimalist production principles are easy to grasp. They give us the aesthetic pleasure of sensuously reenacting in our minds the vast number of repetitions carried out by the artists and of looking for variance in terms of material or specific to the handling.
Yet as soon as we read the information accompanying the works, our first impression changes. We find out that exactly 188,333 lines of 60-cm length were made for “Toward the Horizon,” and that 60 cm is the average length of a step made by a person walking. That the total length of the lines is 113 kilometers and that this is the shortest distance between Tunisia and Italy. The “way to the horizon,” from Africa to Europe – such references instantly conjure up the headlines of recent years about refugees on the Italian island of Lampedusa and the numbers of people who have died while attempting the journey. The onerous drawing of so many black lines then appears as a reenactment of such an escape: It is as though the many steps to Europe are here being counted, and in the end amount to an impenetrable darkness. However, in order to make these steps one would need to be able to walk on water like Jesus as he crossed the Sea of Galilee, or alternatively walk the sea floor between Tunisia and Italy. So is this piece a monument? As in their other works navigating the issue of refugee routes, here Günyol/Kunt arrive at a result that encircles the topic on a range of different levels of meaning.

Our view of the object on the plinth also changes entirely when we learn that this piece of fabric turned into a rope is in fact a 22-meter-long banner used at a demonstration that reads “…AND JUSTICE FOR ALL!” The fragmentary demand would surely have made quite an impact on such a large format. But maybe a more tangible tool was needed to actually bring about the called-for change – and maybe a piece of rope would be just such a thing: It could be used for pulling out prison bars, tying someone up, or at least staging a tug-of-war. But whom would this serve? Are the artists ridiculing spiritless slogans thrown about at demonstrations and calling for more concrete action instead? Is it an artistic proposal for finding ways out of one’s position of powerlessness in face of state authority through Situationist experiments, as suggested by Debord? Or are the protesters being threatened with hanging? Each interpretation reflects the viewer’s attitude to the political conflicts between hegemon and opposition. Incidentally, it remains unclear whether the banner was ever actually hung anywhere, or whether in fact it might not even be a readymade, but an artifact created by the artists for the purpose of realizing this piece. The only thing that is certain is that the work was created in 2010, the very year the judicial reform proposed by Prime Minister Erdoğan was approved in the context of the Turkish constitutional referendum.

Several years later, Günyol/Kunt realized a sculpture that raises issues concerning the potential of peaceful protest and its ability to defend those it champions in a similar way. The piece consists of loops of razor barbed wire, its blades tracing the shapes of acoustic waves depicting the sounds of shouts and slogans chanted at the protests against the planned development of Gezi Park in Istanbul, which made the park famous. The artists thus translated sounds of protest into blades of self-defense, as suggested by the work title “Selbstverteidigung.” This in turn opens up a wide range of interpretations, and each is telling of the interpreter’s own stance on civil disobedience – be it more skeptical or optimistic. The sculpture may then on the one hand stand for the resistance movement’s ability to put up a fight, as an assertion: Whosoever wants to attack these voices will come to harm! On the other hand, the sculpture may be denouncing the opposition’s militarization, as it is now seemingly also prepared to accept bloodshed. Would that still constitute “self-defense”? Whichever the case may be, Günyol/Kunt’s sculpture describes an escalation, and it seems to be expressing an artistic voice looking to position itself with the resistance movements. This artistic voice has not yet found its place and neither does it see itself as being identical with, nor completely separate from direct counteraction. Günyol/Kunt’s practice is a political-artistic one that is acutely aware of the strengths and weaknesses of a restricted view of power and opposition on the level of representation. It is aware of the opportunities and risks of image politics, on the street, in the public sphere, in the sphere of the media and in the elitist shelter of an art exhibition.

Özlem Günyol and Mustafa Kunt both studied sculpture in Ankara. Today they also articulate their ideas and concepts in the media of drawing, print, installation, photography, video, sound and performance. All of their works, without exception, reference political issues. Many revolve around state representation, insignia of power and executive means and try to deconstruct these. Recurring themes include national flags and anthems, monuments, memorials, stately columns, plinths and flagpoles, the body language of election campaigners, methods of surveillance and the death penalty, the Euro and the richest 1%, Fortress Europe, state borders and passports, migration routes and refugee disasters as well as basic texts such as the United Nations human rights charter.

The 16-part piece “That which remains…,” likewise created specially for this exhibition, calls to mind this charter. On closer inspection, we see that each piece of paper shows key terms from the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The letters forming these words are made of salt. Günyol/Kunt crystalized this salt from seawater they brought back from the Aegean Sea – to be more precise, from Dikili and Cesme in Turkey, and from Lesbos and Chios in Greece. As such, four of the main locations relating to the so-called refugee deal are named. In this deal, the EU and Turkey agreed that all refugees stranded in Greece as of March 2016 who do not apply for asylum there will be sent back to Turkey and in return a Syrian refugee from Turkey will be accepted for each Syrian deported from Greece to Turkey. The deal ignores several articles of the UN human rights charter. Günyol/Kunt crystalize the latter’s central moral concepts from the seawater across which the deportations are made.

The framed print created in 2015 and titled “hak” likewise seeks an image for the essence and real relevance of a text fundamental to a particular society – in this case, the Constitution of the Republic of Turkey. The artists set to work on this constitutional text by finding each instance of the word “hak” – which translates into English as “law” – and then aligning the pages in such a way that the word appears at the center of the surface. All pages of the constitution were aligned in this way, then superimposed and printed onto a single page. The result is a graphic depiction of a constitution centered entirely on the “law,” meaning, it is of utmost importance. However, unfortunately the alignment has obliterated all other words and notions described in the text, creating black strips reminiscent of censorship measures. So the obstinate insistence on the law is evidently not ideal. But is it at least aesthetic?

The two artists often use methods of superimposition, alignment and translation into other media. Examples of this are their sandwich print of portrait photos of the 100 richest people in the world, their sound installations based on all the national anthems, their analyses of election campaign slogans and banknote color schemes, and their series of works on national flags. The fifth new work by Günyol/Kunt in this exhibition, the installation “Reds, Yellows & Blues,” belongs to the latter. It consists of three monitors set up near ground level that actually show only these three colors, or rather – as indicated by the unusual plural forms used in the title – different hues of them. They were derived from the national flags of this world and change on the silent screen about every ten seconds. Evidently there is not just the one red, yellow or blue – those primary colors of the historical three-color theory, from which all other colors can be mixed – but ever new adjacencies in the continuum of the color spectrum and new potential fusions. This refers of course to national identities. The title of a famous work by Barnett Newman comes to mind – “Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue?” – as do the attacks it has sustained.

What we can glean from Özlem Günyol and Mustafa Kunt’s oeuvre is that these conceptual artists appear to be looking to understand the nature of power and opposition, which they systematically question by way of analyzing symbols and representations of it. Their work is not lighthearted. They go about it rigorously and with great perseverance; they believe in the political potential of aesthetic experience – and they are not afraid to engage. The artistic actions they conceive lead to artworks that in turn may incite action able to overcome specific social formations. Their transformative artworks are assaults, incitements and objections that, prudently, do not assume an unmistakable position. For it is only in this way that the viewer’s perspective on formally abstracted information and events may become the focus of their reflection: How do I feel about this aestheticization of the horrors of our time? Does the work reflect my political passivity, or is it already part of a process of change? The work of this duo is not knowing, not cynical, polemic or accusatory. It may be somewhat sad, but it is never resigned. It rubs salt in the wound and asks who deals with it and from where. The clichéd search for new perspectives overused in art-speak actually fits here for once. Which is why I am delighted to see Özlem Günyol and Mustafa Kunt honored and supported by being awarded the HAP-Grieshaber Preis 2017.

Die Kraft des ästhetischen Objekts im Kontext abstrakter
Machtprozesse – Über die künstlerische Praxis von
Özlem Günyol und Mustafa Kunt

Um sich der heterogenen künstlerischen Praxis von Özlem Günyol und Mustafa Kunt anzunähern, erscheint es hilfreich, sich weniger an formalen Modellen einer Werkproduktion zu orientieren, als vielmehr die sozialen und kulturellen Kontexte in den Blick zu nehmen, die ihre Kunst zum Gegenstand haben.
Als zentrales Thema ihrer gemeinsamen Arbeit erscheint die Auseinandersetzung mit medial vermittelten Bildern und Zeichensystemen sowie der Verknüpfung von sprachlichen und visuellen Erfahrungen. Wie diese auf die kollektive und individuelle Ausdifferenzierung von Identitäten einwirken, die durch kulturelle und soziale Rahmenbedingungen geformt und vermittelt werden, ist dabei eine ihrer Kunst inhärente Thematik.
Immer werden dabei auch Fragen der medialen Repräsentanz von Macht innerhalb der Subjektbildung berührt und in luzider, formal äußerst vielseitiger Arbeitsweise illustriert. Auch die Auseinandersetzung mit sprachlichen Vermittlungsformen im medialen Kontext wird immer wieder als zentrales Moment ihrer Kunst sichtbar, wobei es die innovative Praxis von Özlem Günyol und Mustafa Kunt schwierig macht, die jeweiligen Themengebiete klar voneinander zu trennen. Nicht zuletzt dadurch offenbart ihr Werk die Durchdringung und Abhängigkeit der Aspekte Medialität und Macht und deren Anbindung an das kulturelle, soziale und politische Verständnis von Identität in unseren heutigen gesellschaftlichen Formationen.
Neben der konzeptuellen Herangehensweise wird in ihren Arbeiten spürbar, wie sich das Alleinstellungsmerkmal der Kunst, die ästhetische Erfahrung, als zentraler Bezugspunkt offenbart. Die an komplexe soziale Fragestellungen anschließenden Arbeiten operieren auch in ihrer konzeptuellen Ausrichtung als herausforderndes ästhetisches Erlebnis.
Günyols und Kunts Schaffen zeigt sich als breit gefächertes sensuelles Feld und ermöglicht damit eine gesonderte Form des Zugriffs auf unsere Umwelt. Ersichtlich wird in ihren Arbeiten, wie formalästhetische Aspekte innerhalb der Arbeitsweise bedeutsam werden und zugleich eine kritische Auseinandersetzung mit gesellschaftlichen Themen aufgegriffen wird.
Eine der aktuellsten Arbeiten des Duos, Hemzemin von 2014, zeigt den wiederholten Umgang mit Symbolen staatlicher Herrschaft und nationaler Repräsentanz. Die Arbeit besteht aus der Transformation eines zwölf Meter hohen Fahnenmastes, der in einem professionellen Schmelzverfahren zu einer 1,5 x 1,5 Meter großen Bodenplatte gegossen wurde. Das begleitende Video zeigt den aufwändigen Prozess der Umformung, der das aufrecht stehende Zeichen nationaler Repräsentanz in eine begehbare Platte auf dem Bodenniveau des Fußwegs in der Dortmunder Innenstadt verwandelt. Als unscheinbarer Bestandteil des öffentlichen Raums wird dem Fahnenmast seine auratische Wirkung entzogen und befragt die Machtstrukturen, die der Fahnenmast als Träger eines staatlich motivierten Herrschaftsanspruches, etwa einer Nationalflagge, postuliert. Das ursprüngliche Objekt wird nun in Relation zum öffentlichen Raum radikal verändert und verweist zugleich auf einer weiteren Bedeutungsebene auf die Funktion des Kunstwerks im urbanen Raum, die für das Duo jenseits repräsentativer Logiken zu liegen scheint.
Im Verhältnis zur neo-avantgardistischen Skulptur im öffentlichen Raum, der ein Anspruch auf größtmögliche Sichtbarkeit zumeist eingeschrieben war, demokratisiert Hemzemin diese Geste nachhaltig. Nicht zuletzt weist der türkische Titel der Arbeit, der im Deutschen mit den Worten ‚eins mit dem Grund sein’ wiederzugeben ist, auf die Normierungs- und Disziplinierungsprozesse, kollektive wie individuelle, die der Funktion von Herrschaftssymbolen -wie etwa Nationalflaggen- zugrunde liegen. Günyols und Kunts Arbeit verweigert eine schnell lesbare Sichtbarkeit zugunsten eines spekulativen Momentes, der die Funktionsmechanismen nationaler Identitäten befragt und zum Schwingen bringt.

In der Arbeit Fresh like the first Day von 2011 rückt die Bedeutung sprachlicher Vermittlung für die Konstitution von Gemeinschaften und die Genese von Wertesystemen in den Mittelpunkt.
Die installative Arbeit besteht aus 53 schwarz eingebundenen Büchern, die in einem der Arbeit zugehörigen Lesebereich für die Besucher zur Ansicht und zum Blättern ausliegen. Jedes der Bücher trägt auf der Frontseite auf schwarzem Grund einen geprägten goldenen Buchstaben des türkischen Alphabetes beziehungsweise der Satzzeichen und Zahlen, die in der türkischen Verfassung von 1982 Verwendung finden. Jedes in der Verfassung verwendete Zeichen wird in einem der 53 Bücher isoliert von allen anderen an exakt der Position der Seite dargestellt, an der es im Gesamttext verortet ist. So entsteht ein durch Auslassungen und Leerstellen geprägtes Konvolut, das seltsam abstrakte Strukturen ausbildet.
Die Motivation zur Entwicklung der Arbeit speist sich aus der jahrelangen Debatte über umfassende Änderungen der 1982 durch die Militärregierung verabschiedeten türkischen Verfassung, die durch eine Volksabstimmung 2010, bei der die Mehrheit der türkischen Bevölkerung für die von der regierenden Partei vorgeschlagenen Änderungen stimmte, ein vorläufiges Ende fand.
Aus dem fortlaufenden Verfassungstext wird in Fresh like the first Day in einem Prozess der Dekonstruktion ein auf 53 Bände differenzierter Index von Zeichen, die in ihrer Gesamtheit einen die türkische Gesellschaft konstituierenden Wert beinhalten. Durch diesen Akt der Zergliederung eröffnet sich ein Denk- und Assoziationsraum, der die Bedeutung von Zeichen und deren Funktion als gesellschaftskonstituierendes Moment hinterfragt. Der isolierte Buchstabe verliert seinen Bedeutungsgehalt, wird er nicht in einen Kontext unterschiedlichster differierender Zeichensysteme integriert.
Der in den Arbeiten Özlem Günyols und Mustafa Kunts offensichtliche Einsatz metaphorischer Aspekte, die dabei alle naiven Vergleichbarkeiten umgehen, zeigt sich, so scheint es, in den Leerstellen und Lücken, die der vermeintliche Text in den einzelnen Bänden von Fresh like the first Day aufweist. Die Installation regt ein bildhaftes Nachdenken über die Faktoren an, die Gemeinschaft konstituieren. Sind es die fest gefügten Systeme, ein Text, der dies ermöglicht, oder ist es das Zusammenspiel von Individuum und Kollektiv, das die zu definierenden offenen Räume in Bewegung bringt, um Teilhabe und Gemeinschaft zu ermöglichen?

Die Arbeit … and Justice for all! aus dem Jahr 2010 besteht aus einem 22 Meter langen, im Durchmesser etwa fünf Zentimeter starkem Seil, das gleichmäßig ausgeleuchtet auf einem Sockel akkurat zu einem lockeren Kreis zusammengerollt ist. Die Präzision, mit der das Seil gearbeitet wurde, wird durch die straffe Drillung und die exakt geknoteten und fixierten Enden auch für den Laien sichtbar. Diese augenscheinlich fachmännische Technik der Herstellung steht zu dem Material, das eher an poveres Leinen oder gewebte Stoffe erinnert, in einem gewissen Spannungsverhältnis.
Vermeintlich wird hier ein Seil als Kunst im Sinne eines Readymades vorgestellt, doch es bleiben Zweifel, ob dieses Seil tatsächlich einem funktionalen Gebrauchszweck entfremdet wurde – zu weich wirkt das Material, das unter der Bearbeitung des Streckens und Drehens sichtbar an Grenzpunkte seiner Belastbarkeit geführt wurde. Zudem zeichnen sich innerhalb des gedrillten Stoffes intensive grüne, gelbe, rote, orange und blaue Farbfelder ab, welche die Beige- und Ockertöne des restlichen Materials rhythmisieren.
Die weiterführende Auseinandersetzung mit dem Objekt verstärkt die Zweifel an der ausschließlich an einer Funktionalität orientierten Existenz des Seils, da eine kurze Erläuterung darüber aufklärt, dass das Seil ursprünglich aus einem Protestbanner entstanden ist, das den titelgebenden Schriftzug … and Justice for all! trug. Deutlich wird hierbei die Zielsetzung, jenseits der Herstellung eines Seiles eine Irritation zu inszenieren, die auf der Veränderung der Materialeigenschaften, also der Verarbeitung eines Stoffbanners zu einem Seil, beruht. Zunächst verweist die Transformation eines Banners zu einem Seil auf einen Prozess, der als Verfremdung des ursprünglichen Funktionszusammenhangs zu verstehen ist und diesen damit entwertet. Zugleich wird das Objekt nun in einem neuen Bedeutungsfeld verortet.
Diente das Banner der Vermittlung einer politischen Botschaft oder sozialen Forderung, die in der Öffentlichkeit zur Sprache gebracht wurde, so zeigt sich das Seil nun im Kunstkontext als ein Objekt, das eine kritische Denkbewegung anzustoßen in der Lage ist. Es scheint, als vollziehe sich die Anschlussfähigkeit der Arbeit an gesellschaftliche Fragestellungen, die den reinen Objektcharakter des Werkes hinter sich lassen, anhand einer nun assoziativen Lesbarkeit des Seils, das nun auch als Strick gedeutet werden kann und damit wiederum Fragen nach den Mechanismen von Gerechtigkeit und den dahinter stehenden Machtbeziehungen evoziert. Kann das Seil als funktionales Zeichen des Zusammenhaltes gesellschaftlicher Gruppen verstanden werden? Ist das Seil, als ein Bild für Vernetzungen, also Kommunikation, zu verstehen, das Verbindungen, sozialen Austausch und Zugehörigkeit generieren kann? Und wird nicht anhand des Transformationsprozesses von einem Banner zu einem Seil die Denkbewegung einer textuellen Annäherung an soziale Fragen hin zu einer metaphorischen und damit universalen, nicht-sprachlichen Aussageebene vorgeführt?
Eine weitere Arbeit, die sich mit den Repräsentationsmechanismen staatlicher Macht auseinandersetzt, ist Flag-s von 2009. Das auf Nesselstoff ausgeführte Werk zeigt eine schwarze rechteckige Fläche, deren Korona durch verschiedene Farben und einen Blauschimmer gebildet wird. Grundlage der Arbeit ist ein Druckverfahren, das die Nationalflaggen aller anerkannten 246 Länder der Erde übereinander druckt und als Resultat eine abstrakte schwarze Fläche generiert. Die vielfältigen Zeichen staatlicher Repräsentanz, die die Flaggen zu transportieren versuchen, werden durch die Überlagerung nur als abstraktes Bild sichtbar. Das Repräsentationszeichen entwertet sich dabei im Prozess der Überlagerung selbst. Auch hier wird das Kunstobjekt zum Ausgangspunkt einer Reflexion über die Kraft der repräsentativen Macht- und Zugehörigkeitsmodelle, die Gemeinschaften prägen und für diese stehen.

Augenfällig erscheint an den Arbeiten von Özlem Günyol und Mustafa Kunt der bewusst thematisierte Bezug zum sensuellen Objektcharakter ihrer Werke, der als Grundlage der beiden zentralen inhaltlichen Schwerpunkte deutlich wird. Zum einen die gezielte Inszenierung der materialästhetischen Qualität, die in den Arbeiten hervor tritt. Zum anderen die Anbindung dieses Aspekts an Fragen der kollektiven Identitätsbildung und den ihr zugrunde liegenden Normierungsprozessen. Durch die Betonung des Objektcharakters wird es möglich, die vielfach abstrakt wirkende Befragung der Themen Macht und Disziplinierung bildnerisch greifbar zu machen und an ein Objekt rückzukoppeln. Die Materialität des Objekts ermöglicht eine ästhetische Auseinandersetzung, die immer an eine kritische Verhandlung von Begriffen wie Identität und Norm, Macht und Gewalt und deren oftmals physisch nicht greifbare Wirkungsweise gebunden bleibt.

Gerade im Kontext gegenwärtiger Diskussionen um die gesellschaftliche Funktion der Kunst, verorten sich die Arbeiten von Özlem Günyol und Mustafa Kunt hellsichtig als Zwischenposition einer engagierten, explizit gesellschaftskritischen Kunst und dem Bestreben, kreativen Artikulationen einen autonomen Erfahrungsbereich jenseits funktionaler, sozialer Fragen zuzugestehen. Gegenüber einer voreiligen Zuordnung ihrer Kunst zu einer politischen Ausrichtung, optieren die Arbeiten zugunsten eines Regimes der Sichtbarkeit, die Jacques Rancière als Grundlage politischer und auch künstlerischer Handlungsfelder positionieren würde.*
Das Künstlerduo setzt sich im Kontext ihrer kritischen künstlerischen Bezugnahme mit einer unmittelbar erlebten Differenz unterschiedlicher Modelle des individuellen und kollektiven Identitätsverständnisses und dessen medialer Vermittlung auseinander. Das Nachdenken darüber, welche abstrakten und bildlich kaum fixierbaren Konstruktionsmechanismen über kulturell und historisch geprägte Disziplinierungsinstanzen in verschiedenen Kulturen und Wertesystemen auf das Individuum einwirken, bildet den Ausgangspunkt ihrer luziden künstlerischen Tätigkeit, die gesamtgesellschaftliche Aussagen über unsere Gegenwart zu artikulieren versteht, ohne die Eigenwertigkeit der ästhetischen Erfahrung als produktives Erfahrungsmodell zu negieren.

Felix Ruhöfer

*Jacques Rancière: Die Aufteilung des Sinnlichen; Berlin 2006

WHEN NEWS AND ACTIONS BECOME FORM

In Turkey, everyday life is being shaped by an increasing tension and violence in a context where a new unexpected incident dominates the daily agenda almost everyday and problems and discussions overlap, get forgotten or become insignificant as a result. Due to political tension caused by increasingly authoritarian attitudes of the ruling party, the country, the city, the atmosphere, our souls suffer from a chronic restlessness. From Gezi protests to Soma coal mine accident, bombings in Diyarbakır, Suruç and Ankara, from Syrian refugees whose bodies hit the Mediterranean shores to heated conflicts in the South East and the repeating of general elections, we are almost out of breath while following events of immense gravity that deeply affect the flow of everyday life almost instantaneously. This experience in the local context of Turkey is shaped by a larger constellation of economic, political and power relations in a global context. Özlem Günyol and Mustafa Kunt name their exhibition with reference to the ever-changing daily agenda and people’s emotional states in flux. Yet, rather than focusing on moments of insecurity and unrest, they highlight moments of resistance and collective experience at both local and international level.

minute-by-minute exhibition centres around the work Right (2015), which highlights the concept of right as the basis of many of the issues at stake in the agenda. Taking as a starting point the idea that the foundational function of a constitution is to secure the basic rights and freedom of individuals, the work graphically brings together all 36 of the instances that the word “right” is used in the constitution of the Republic of Turkey. Through the overlap of all these words, the whole text of the constitution is also brought into the gallery, and while the word “right” is highlighted, the rest of the text is pushed to the background, such that they look almost censured because of the merging of words as dark illegible lines. As such, the fundamental issue in the relationship between the state and the citizen, the ruling power and the individual becomes a central concern for the exhibition and creates a link between all the other works.

As Günyol and Kunt’s first solo exhibition in Turkey, minute-by-minute draws attention to some of the issues that the artists have been exploring for quite a long time, yet allowing for more local interpretations in the context of the current political situation in Turkey. The exhibition brings together seven works, five of which are specifically made for this show. In these works, the artists continue the conceptual approach that they have put into practice in many of their earlier works. In order to draw attention to various issues and situations they use language, appropriate images and sound from daily news, the media and the internet, and isolate and transform them into forms, rather than changing them with a subjective interpretation. Günyol and Kunt reduce their subject matter down to a formal or conceptual essence and represent them in a situation where the audience confronts the daily information and news as part of a larger system.

Just as they did with the word “right”, it is a common strategy for Günyol and Kunt to highlight a situation, a fact, or a phenomenon by making it more visible. For example, Self-Defence (2015), which is another central piece in the exhibition, visualizes the collective sound of protestors during the Gezi Park resistance. In this piece, the artists magnify a ten second sound file recorded during the protests and turn it into a 330 metre razor wire. The sound waves gain physical forms as steel plates and are fixed on a spring wire as if they are protrusions on a razor wire. The fact that the audio recording is a file found on the internet highlights the anonymity of the spread of Gezi protests. On the other hand, the razor wire was produced in one piece, presenting all sound waves, each unique in shape, as part of a whole, reminding of the Gezi experience as a collective existence within a plurality of differences. Using as a starting point the use of razor wire for protection purposes, the artists visualized a similar type of protected area created by the coming together of protestors against the oppressing power. The fact that Gezi Park still continues to exist as a park as a gain of the resistance can be considered a result of such collectively created protected area. The installation of the work in the gallery space aims to reflect a sense of solidarity, the idea of a crowd that incorporates differences while also creating a solid ground for itself.

In a similar vain, On the Stage (2010) and Fireworks (2015) also point at the visuality of certain moments during protests and demonstrations. Günyol and Kunt endeavour to find the most appropriate form and medium for each subject matter they deal with. For these two works they have chosen the medium of video. The first one is a performative work that they have made in collaboration with a dancer. In this short film that is based on some photographs taken at various protests, the dancer stops her movements whenever her body matches the poses of protestors in photographs and stays still for a few seconds. In that way, the video detaches these moments from their contexts highlighted by the media and draws attention to the corporeal aspects of protests by making the poses even more visible as presented outside of the language of the media. This work reminds of some figures from Gezi resistance, such as the lady in a red dress being tear-gassed by the police, an image that became iconic through its circulation in the media. It also brings to the fore a bodily presence of protestors, an existence in-between individuality and collectivity.

Fireworks also makes use of protest images found on the internet and is based on fireworks that have become a common tool used during protests against police suppression. This work digitally isolates protesters’ fireworks from their environment and presents them in film form. It points at a strategy for ground protection, this time a strategy that uses both visuality and sound at the same time. Fireworks which are commonly used during celebrations gain a new function at protests and turn into a defence tool that keeps the police away. Günyol and Kunt’s representation of fireworks detached from protest settings transforms them in such a way that they regain their original function. This is a transformation that reminds of the celebratory mood during Gezi protests when a sense of unity and solidarity intensified among the protestors. With the diffusion of the sound of exploding fireworks across the gallery space, this duality in the function of fireworks also spreads across other works in the exhibition and enables to approach issues such as resistance, rights, and defence with reference to a similar type of duality. For example, the razor wire could evoke a sense of physical pain and violence due to its structure and material, but as a holistic construct that brings together differences it also symbolizes a stance against the violence of oppressing powers rather than indicating the violence it inflicts itself.

Other works in the exhibition put international political and economical power structures against resistance and protest movements. With the inclusion of these works, the exhibition avoids the risk of being interpreted only in relation to the turbulent political context of Turkey, but allows for seeing local issues as part of a global context. For example, the work The Myth (2013) is based on the story of Europa in Greek mythology. The work connects the abduction of Europa by Zeus disguised as a bull to contemporary capitalist power mechanisms against which Occupy resistance movement emerged. European Central Bank has recently appropriated an image of Europa on a 2000 year old Greek vase and transferred it onto 5 Euro banknotes, putting the image into circulation. Referring to this as another act of abduction of Europa, the artists have focused on the figure of Zeus in order to draw attention to the hegemony of financial markets and global capitalism as part of which the European Central Bank also operates. In this new story, the bull figure that stands for Zeus is now the symbol of capitalism and it is identical with the Charging Bull sculpture on Wall Street. At this point, the resistance highlighted in the previous works are now part of a greater resistance against global capitalism. The occupy movement that have spread across many cities and countries starting with the Occupy Wall Street in 2011, was a demand for global justice against inequalities caused by the dominance of large corporations and the global financial system. In The Myth, Günyol and Kunt appropriate an image of a raging bull from an Occupy Wall Street poster, which shows the bull tied with ropes in an attempt to keep it under control, and place it on a vase made in the form of an ancient Greek vase. As such, the work itself creates the myth of today. The Vendetta mask decorations on the vase put the anonymous people’s movement against global capitalism. As such, The Europa myth, which creates a link between the ancient Greek and the idea of pan-Europe as represented by the European Central Bank, becomes a part of a greater economical and political struggle on the vase.

Günyol and Kunt address the inequality in the distribution of wealth as emphasized with the slogan “we are the 99 percent” by looking at the other side of the equation. The Portrait (2015) is a piece that brings together in a photographic print the wealthiest 100 people listed in Forbes magazine’s World’s Billionaires list for 2015. The portrait, a composite image made by printing of 100 photographs on top of each other, presents an anonymous character, representing these people in a manner similar to the anonymity of protestors. In this image no individual can be distinguished in the overlapped photographs; ghost images of all those people blend into a single image, as if it is an identikit. The dimensions of the photograph are proportioned to the format of biometrical portrait photographs common for passports and visa applications. As such, the work imitates an official visual aesthetics and visualizes the way in which these hundred people lose their individuality and become a statistical figure. In that way it also connects wealth, financial markets and the functioning of the capitalist order to the official ideology of states. One can see a human figure on this photograph only looking from a certain distance, which evokes the distance between the characters that make the portrait and the rest of people representing the 99 percent. The fact that the list includes billionaires from all around the world underlines the global dimension of this distance.

The final work in the exhibition, Constitutive Lines (2015) uses a similar process of overlapping and reduces national flags into geometrical lines such that the flags can no longer be distinguished from each other. The work makes use of the lines used in the design of flags and brings together all the flags through shared geometrical forms and a linear language devoid of any colour and symbol that can be associated with a nation. As a result, the flags lose their symbolic function and disappear in the plurality of overlapping lines. The collective existence of protestors as emphasized in the other works is faced with a global world where all the borders mix into each other. Overall, in this exhibition Günyol and Kunt associate the common language of resistance movements with symbols of power mechanisms. Thereby, they continue their explorations on borders, states, globalization and belonging, subject matters that they have been working on for so long, yet with a perspective that also takes into account today’s unstable troubled times.

HABERLER VE  EYLEMLER FORMLARA DÖNÜŞÜRKEN

Türkiye’de sürekli yeni bir olayın gündemde öne çıkmasıyla sorunların, tartışmaların iç içe geçtiği, unutulduğu ya da değersizleştiği bir ortamda, gündelik hayat da giderek artan tansiyon ve hatta şiddetle şekilleniyor. Git gide otoriterleşmiş olan iktidarın yarattığı siyasi gerginliğin de etkisiyle, kronik bir tedirginlik duygusu, ülkeye, şehre, atmosfere, ruhumuza yerleşmiş durumda. Gezi olaylarından, Soma maden kazasına, Diyarbakır, Suruç, Ankara patlamalarına, ölüleri kıyılara vuran Suriyeli mültecilerden, Güneydoğu’daki çatışmalara ve tekrarlanan genel seçimlere, kısa bir süre içinde hayatın akışını derinden etkileyecek büyüklükte pek çok olayı adeta soluk soluğa takip eder durumdayız. Yerel bağlamda yaşanan bu hal, Türkiye’nin de dahil olduğu küresel bağlam içinde daha büyük ekonomik, siyasi ve iktidar ilişkileri yumağının içinde şekilleniyor. Özlem Günyol ve Mustafa Kunt, tam da bu sürekli değişen olay ve duygu hallerinden yola çıkarak isimlendirdiği sergilerinde, bu güvensizlik ya da tedirginlik anlarındansa hem yerel hem de uluslararası alanda yaşanan direniş anlarına, kolektif deneyimlere dikkat çekiyor. 

an-be-an sergisi, gündemdeki pek çok konunun temelini teşkil eden bir kavramı öne çıkaran Hak (2015) işini merkeze alarak kurgulanmış. Anayasanın temelinin bireylerin temel hak ve özgürlüklerini güvence altına alma gerekliliği olması fikrinden hareket eden bu yapıt, Türkiye Cumhuriyeti anayasasında bulunan 36 adet “hak” kelimesinin grafik olarak üst üste getirilmesiyle oluşturulmuş. Böylelikle yapıt tüm anayasa metnini sergi mekanına taşırken, üst üste bindirme yoluyla “hak” kelimesini öne çıkararak metnin kalanını, kelimelerin çarpışmasıyla oluşan siyah hatlar nedeniyle neredeyse sansürlenmiş hissi yaratacak şekilde geri plana itiyor. Devlet-vatandaş, iktidar-birey ilişkisindeki temel mesele böylece serginin ana eksenini belirleyerek diğer yapıtlar arasında bir bağ kuruyor. 

Günyol ve Kunt, Türkiye’deki ilk kişisel sergileri olan bu sergide, önceden beri üzerlerine kafa yormakta oldukları konulara Türkiye’nin içinde bulunduğu politik karmaşa içinde daha yerel okumalara izin verecek şekilde dikkat çekmeye devam ediyor. Sanatçılar, sergide sunulan beşi yeni üretilmiş yedi işle, önceki pek çok işlerinde uyguladıkları kavramsal yaklaşımı sürdürüyor. Dili kullanarak, gündelik haberler, medya ve internetten yayılan görüntü ve seslerden alıntılar yaparak, onları yorumlayıp değiştirmektense bulundukları ortamdan soyutlamak ve formlara dönüştürmek yoluyla çeşitli durum ve meselelere dikkat çekiyorlar. Günyol ve Kunt’un biçimsel, sessel ya da kavramsal bir öze indirgeyerek yeniden sundukları konular aracılıyla, her gün karşılaştığımız gündelik bilgiler, duyduğumuz haberler daha büyük bir sistemin parçası olarak karşımıza çıkıyor.

“Hak” kelimesinde olduğu gibi bir şeyi, durumu ya da olguyu alıp daha da görünür kılarak vurgulamak, Günyol ve Kunt’un sıkça başvurduğu bir strateji. Örneğin, serginin genel fikrini öne çıkaran bir diğer iş olarak Öz-Savunma (2015), Gezi direnişi sırasında protestocuların toplu halde çıkardığı sesi görselleştiriyor. Protestolar sırasında kaydedilmiş yaklaşık on saniyelik bir ses dosyasını büyüterek, 330 metrelik bir jiletli tel haline getirdikleri bu işte, ses dalgaları görsel formlara bürünerek yay teli üzerine yerleştirilmiş çelik levhalar halinde telin jiletvari çıkıntılarını oluşturuyor. Ses kaydının internetten alınmış buluntu bir dosya olması, Gezi protestolarının yayılmasındaki anonimliği vurgularken, jiletli telin tek parça halinde üretilerek hiçbiri birbirine benzemeyen ses dalgalarını bir bütün halinde sunması, Gezi sürecinde öne çıkan, farklılıklar içinde kolektif bir var oluş halini hatırlatıyor. Jiletli telin korunma amaçlı kullanımından yola çıkan sanatçılar, direnişçilerin bir araya gelme yoluyla iktidara karşı oluşturdukları benzer bir korunaklı alanı görselleştiriyor. Direnişin bir kazancı olarak Gezi Park’ının varlığını hâlâ park olarak sürdürüyor olması bunun bir sonucu sayılabilir. İşin sergideki yerleştirmesi de direnişteki beraberlik hissini yansıtacak şekilde, hem farklılıkları içeren hem de kendine bütünlüklü bir alan yaratmış bir kalabalık fikrini uyandırmayı hedefliyor.         

Sergide bulunan işlerden Sahnede (2010) ve Havai Fişekler (2015) de benzer şekilde direniş ve protestolardaki anların ve eylemlerin görselliğine dikkat çekiyor. Her yapıtlarında ele aldıkları konuya uygun form ve ifade aracını bulmak için çaba gösteren Günyol ve Kunt, bu işlerin her ikisini de video olarak sunuyor. Birincisi, sanatçıların bir dansçıyla birlikte ürettikleri performatif bir çalışma. Çeşitli protesto gösterilerinde çekilmiş fotoğraflardan yola çıkarak üretilmiş bu kısa filmde, dansçı, hareketleri protestocuların gösteri anlarında girdikleri pozları yakaladığı anlarda birkaç saniyelik sürelerle hareketsiz kalıyor. Böylelikle bu video, medyanın öne çıkardığı anları bağlamından kopararak, protesto eylemlerinin bedensel boyutunu, medya dilinin dışına çıkarak daha da görünür kılıyor. Bu çalışma, Gezi direnişi sırasında biber gazına maruz kalan kırmızılı kadın gibi, medyada çıkan fotoğraflar aracılığıyla ikonlaşmış figürleri hatırlatırken, aynı zamanda bir önceki işin aksine bireysellik ve kolektiflik arasında kalan bir bedensel var oluşu öne çıkarıyor.

Havai Fişekler ise protesto gösterilerinde polisin gösteriyi bastırmaya yönelik girişimlerine karşı son dönemde yaygın şekilde kullanılmaya başlanan havai fişeklerden yola çıkarak, yine internetten bulunmuş protesto görüntülerinden yararlanıyor. Havai fişeklerin dijital yöntemlerle etraflarından yalıtılarak yeniden film olarak sunulmasından ibaret olan bu çalışma, bu kez hem görselliği hem de sesi bir arada kullanan bir alan koruma stratejisine dikkat çekiyor. Çoğunlukla kutlama amaçlı kullanılan havai fişekler, gösteri kültüründe polisi geride tutan bir tür savunma aracına dönüşüyor. Günyol ve Kunt’un havai fişekleri gösteri ortamlarından ayırarak sunması, onları orijinal işlevlerini anımsatacak şekilde dönüştürüyor. Gezi protestolarında birlik ve beraberliğin öne çıktığı zamanlar yoğun olarak yaşanan kutlama havasını da anımsatan bir dönüşüm bu. Filmdeki havai fişek patlama seslerinin galerinin geri kalanına da yayılmasıyla, havai fişeklerin anlamındaki bu ikilik bir bakıma sergideki diğer işlerde ele alınan direniş, hak, savunma gibi konuların benzer bir ikilikle ilişkili görülebilmesini sağlıyor. Örneğin jiletli tel, yapısı ve dokusu nedeniyle fiziksel acı ve şiddeti de algılatabilirken, farklılıkları bir arada tutan bütünsel kurgulamasıyla kendi yarattığı şiddettense iktidar şiddetine karşı bir duruşu simgeliyor.   

Sergideki diğer işler ise direniş ve protesto hareketlerinin karşısına uluslararası bağlamdaki siyasal ve ekonomik iktidar odaklarını çıkarıyor. Böylelikle sergi, sadece Türkiye’nin çalkantılı politik gündemiyle ilişkili okunabilecek bir sergi olmaktan çıkıp yerel konuların küresel bir çerçevede değerlendirilebileceği bir alana taşınıyor. Örneğin, antik vazo biçimindeki Mit (2013) adlı yapıt, Yunan mitolojisindeki Europa hikayesinden yola çıkarak, Tanrı Zeus’un boğa şekline bürünerek Europa’yı kaçırmasını, son yıllarda ortaya çıkan Occupy (İşgal) hareketlerinin direniş gösterdiği kapitalist iktidar mekanizmalarına bağlıyor. 2000 yıllık bir antik Yunan vazosunda temsil edilen Europa figürünün Avrupa Merkez Bankası tarafından 5 Avro’luk banknotlar üzerine taşınarak kullanıma sokulmasını Europa’nın yeniden kaçırılması olarak niteleyen sanatçılar, bu yapıtta Zeus figürüne dikkat çekerek, Avrupa Merkez Bankası’nın dahil olduğu mali piyasalara, küresel kapitalizmin egemenliğine dikkat çekiyor. Bu yeni hikayede, Zeus’u temsil eden boğa figürü artık kapitalizmin simgesidir ve New York’ta Wall Street’teki boğa heykeliyle özdeşleşir. Bu noktada, sergideki diğer işlerin ele aldığı direniş artık küresel kapitalizme karşı bir direnişin parçası olur. 2011’de Occupy Wall Street ile dikkat çeken ve pek çok şehir ve ülkeye yayılan işgal hareketleri, büyük şirketler ve küresel finans sisteminin dünyadaki hakimiyetine ve yarattığı eşitsizliğe karşı bir küresel adalet talebinin yansımasıydı. Mit işinde Günyol ve Kunt, Occupy Wall Street hareketine ait bir posterdeki iplerle hizaya alınmaya çalışılan kızgın boğa imgesini antik Yunan vazosu formundaki bir vazo üzerine yerleştirerek günümüzün mitini kurguluyor ve vazoyu Vendetta maskeleriyle süsleyerek küresel kapitalizme karşı anonim halk hareketini koyuyor. Böylece Avrupa Merkez Bankası’nın temsil ettiği pan-Avrupa fikrini antik Yunan’a bağlayan Europa miti, vazo üzerinde daha büyük bir ekonomik ve politik kavganın parçası oluyor.

İşgal hareketinin “yüzde 99 bizleriz” sloganıyla vurguladığı servet dağılımındaki eşitsizlik, sergideki Portre (2015) işiyle taraflardan diğerine dikkat çekerek ele alınıyor. Forbes dergisinin 2015 yılı için yaptığı Dünyanın Milyarderleri listesinde yer alan en zengin 100 kişinin fotoğraflarının üst üste basılmasıyla oluşan bu portre, tıpkı protestocuların anonimliği gibi bu yüz kişinin bileşimiyle oluşan anonim bir karakterin resmini sunuyor. Üst üste bindirilen fotoğrafların iç içe geçmesiyle oluşan görüntüde hiçbir kişi ayrı ayrı seçilemezken, tüm kişilerin hayalet imgesi ortak bir robot resimde birleşiyor. Çoğunlukla pasaport ve vize işlemleri için kullanılan biyometrik vesikalık formatının oranlarında üretilmiş olan fotoğraf, resmî bir görsel estetiği taklit etmek yoluyla bu yüz kişinin bireyselliklerini kaybederek birer istatistik figürüne dönüşmesini görselleştirmiş oluyor. Böylece aynı zamanda zenginlik, mali piyasalar ve kapitalist düzenin dengeleri devletlerin resmî ideolojisine de bağlanıyor. Inkjet baskı ile üretilmiş fotoğrafta ancak belli bir mesafeden bakıldığında bir insan figürünün belirginleşmesi, portreyi oluşturan karakterlerle geri kalan yüzde 99’u temsil edenler arasındaki mesafeyi hissettirirken, listenin dünya çapında olması ve farklı ülkeler ve milletten milyarderleri kapsaması bu mesafenin küresel boyutunu da ortaya koyuyor.

Sergideki diğer iş Kurucu Çizgiler (2015) ise benzer bir üst üste bindirme işlemi yoluyla ulusal bayrakları birbirinden ayırt edilemeyen geometrik çizgiler haline getiriyor. Yalnızca bayraklardaki temel tasarım çizgilerini kullanan çalışma, bayrakları bir ulusla ilişkilendirilebilecek renk ve sembollerden arıtılmış ortak bir geometrik form ve çizgisel bir dille bir araya getiriyor. Böylece bayraklar, simgesel işlevlerini yitirerek üst üste gelen çizgilerin çoğulluğunda kaybolmaktadır. Diğer işlerde vurgulanan göstericilerin kolektif varoluşu, ulusal kurguların ötesinde, sınırların birbirine karıştığı küresel bir dünyayla karşı karşıyadır. Günyol ve Kunt, direniş eylemlerinin ortak dilini iktidar mekanizmalarının sembolleriyle ilişkilendirerek, önceden beri sorguladıkları, sınırlar, devletler, küreselleşme, aidiyet gibi konulardaki araştırmalarını bugünün istikrarsız, tedirgin ortamına taşımaktadır.

Özlem Günyol & Mustafa Kunt

Dortmund, Germany
Dortmunder Kunstverein

In an era of globalization, borders become contested: geographical frontiers, legal limits, human rights. Özlem Günyol and Mustafa Kunt’s ambitious exhibition at the Dortmunder Kunstverein traced our interactions with these boundaries. How do borders shape our lives, and how can we, in turn, re-shape them?
The duo’s approach was kaleidoscopic, using a variety of lenses to engage with a wide range of issues: the monetary perimeter of the Euro which divides the European Union from the artists’ native Turkey; the legal limits inscribed in passports; geographic confines as seen in atlases or on maps; the physical boundary of barbed wire; and the symbolic demarcation of the flagpole. In the sculpture Untitled (2014), for instance, Günyol and Kunt pressed the various metals from which Euros are coined into thin, cubed tiles and laid them atop each other to construct a rigid coloured cube. In contact yet apart, the artists repeated this tactic using paint in Scheinbogen (2014), where the artists used the colours of Euro banknotes to create the illusion of a rainbow on canvas. In BTO-28, CBT-65, BTO-22 (2013), meanwhile, diffe¬rent types of barbed wire were translated into musical scores on the basis of the shapes of the spikes and the impressive wall dra¬-wing Ceaseless Doodle (2009) traced various geographical borders, turning their rigid ideological lines into a chaotic clot of overlapping and intersecting ones.
There was a single thread running through each of the works, however: borders are always both material and symbolic. The patterns printed in our passports to differentiate, say, a German from a Turkish one, the shapes of the points on barbed wire, the colours of money: each is an arbitrary symbolic language used to designate a socially constructed threshold. What Günyol and Kunt have achieved here, mostly successfully, is to both deconstruct the artificiality of these languages while at the same time constructing alternatives in their place. In Untitled and Scheinbogen – which in German means rainbow or mirage – this reconstruction appears above all visual, whilst the clot of borders drawn over and on top of each other in Ceaseless Doodle creates the illusion of a fictional universe: a cosmos in its own right full of mysterious rules and natural laws that make no sense to us.
The highlight of the exhibition was the sculpture and video Hemzemin (2014) – Turkish for ‘common ground.’ Here the artists melted a flagpole into a flat metal plate, which was embedded into the pavement just outside the gallery. If a flagpole helps demonstrates a nation’s might; by melting down the pole and inserting it into the street, the artists propose a more humble, democratic notion – the result is neither beautiful nor conspicuous.
The question raised here concerned the malleability of borders. To what extent can migrant workers and refugees, for instance, manipulate the borders that exert such influence upon them? Judging from Hemzemin, there is a limit: ‘democracy’ here has been achieved not simply by incorporating but by negating its predecessor, with the plate resembling a gravestone. Oscillating between hope and despair, this chilling message was a worthy end to a thoughtful show.

—by Timotheus Vermeulen

Timotheus Vermeulen is Assistant Professor in Cultural Theory at Radboud University Nijmegen, where he also heads the Centre for New Aesthetics. He is co-founding editor of the academic arts and culture webzine Notes on Metamodernism. He is currently completing two books on metamodernism.

Bringing down the Flags
Flags and Flagpoles in the Works of Özlem Günyol and Mustafa Kunt

A flat, regular area interrupts the cobbled sidewalk of the Hoher Wall in Dortmund: an approximately 1.5 x 1.5 m square plate let into the ground. At first sight the dark, matt steel appears to convey no information. An aesthetic disturbance of the regular, gray cobblestone pattern, to be sure, but an extremely restrained one. Only on closer inspection does one learn that it is a “12 meter stainless steel flagpole.” The artwork Hemzemin by the Turkish artist duo Özlem Günyol and Mustafa Kunt was put in position near the Dortmund Kunstverein in the context of their solo show there from May to July 2014. It represents merely the end product of a process in the course of which a twelve-meter-high flagpole and the base designed to fix it in the ground were melted down and cast as an approximately 1 cm-thick square plate measuring 1.5 x 1.5 meters; a video documenting the process is on view in the exhibition.

“Nailing one’s colors to the mast”? The Representational Logic of the Flag
Flagpole (2007) is a comparable work by the artist duo who live in Frankfurt am Main and have collaborated since 2005. A commercially available aluminum flagpole was put up outside the Paulskirche in Frankfurt for this work and was then bent into an abstract shape with the aid of welding equipment. Flagpole is the first in a series of works with flags and flagpoles that began, significantly enough, a year after the World Cup in 2006—an important date, since it was in the wake of the football championship, together with the controversial media campaign “Du bist Deutschland” [You are Germany] (2005/2006) designed to strengthen German national feeling, that public debate about displaying the black-red-gold flag took a much-discussed turn: Germans could “at last be proud again” of their nationality and, most important, “nail their colors to the mast.”1 It is not hard to see that the artistic alienation of a flagpole outside the Paulskirche, site of the national assembly in 1848, was a commentary on this recrudescence of national feeling. Yet the various national colors rarely play a role in Günyol’s and Kunt’s works, and other state symbols, such as national anthems in Hullabaloo, or the outlines of state borders in Ceaseless Doodle, do not generally appear individually, but en masse, as cumulative global noise. In f.skl.246 (2009) the artists arranged the colors of the 246 national flags of the world2 alphabetically according to the names of the countries and printed them on cotton paper as an abstract display of stripes. The result, citing Gerhard Richter’s Stripes series, turns the colors of individual countries into flickering polychrome. The alphabetical ordering overrules power-political factors and hierarchies in favor of the aesthetic. These other factors only intrude due to a formal loophole: the format of the picture is defined by the width/height ratio of the Rwandan flag, as the artists explain in their statement on the work. In Flag-s (likewise 2009), where the colors of the flags of all the world’s countries have been printed on top of each other and the resultant picture transferred to fabric, the Rwandan flag, alienated by inversion, is the only flag identifiable since its width/height ratio extends it beyond the otherwise black area. This highlighting of a country where conflicting national affiliations led to genocide is camouflaged to look like the result of purely formal and aesthetic precepts. No specific statement is made about political events, whether by way of instruction or to generate new knowledge, and yet our attention is nonetheless subtly directed at them.
The flag, in the words of Felix Ruhöfer, is an exemplary instance of the “pervasion and interdependence of aspects of media and power, and their connection to the cultural, social, and political understanding of identity in our society”3 that the works of Özlem Günyol and Mustafa Kunt reveal. Its functions as a national symbol are manifold, ranging from territorial claims and the securing of frontiers to representation and the communication of membership. Flags visually define the state as a palpable entity, manifesting an inside and an outside, and have identificatory efficacy among other things thanks to their color-form symbolism. Likewise in federations of states such as the European Union, flags establish a common identity without any reference to the fragility of “common values,” the violent mechanisms of exclusion at their borders, or the existential conditions, or plight, of their populations.4 The complexity of worldwide mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, one might say, culminates in the ostensibly simple symbolism of the flag. The flag’s materiality as a textile object takes this symbolism beyond any two-dimensional aesthetic and effect, augmenting it—think of the symbolism of victory or the revolutionary uplift of fluttering flags—and it is clearly no accident that the artists also chose fabric as the support for Flag-s.
Similarly, a flagpole likewise materially embodies this logic of representation. Serving corporations as a marketing instrument, on the one hand, and fulfilling, on the other, a primarily political role outside city halls, government buildings, or embassies, the flagpole in its representational and toweringly symbolic function is little heeded in everyday life. Its meaning and purpose, in a certain sense, is that of a “picture support,” raising aloft the flag and aiding the symbol to enhanced visibility over people’s heads. In the artists’ words: “Its function is to fortify the represented image by carrying the image to an ‘inaccessible point.’” That it is fixed in the ground is not merely a question of anchorage but of clearly demarcating (one’s own) territory.

“To be one with the ground”: Grassroots Democracy for the Urban Environment
The work Hemzemin, its title a Turkish compound meaning roughly “to be one with the ground,” draws on these aspects of anchorage. The material of the picture support that originally strove upward has now literally been laid at the feet of passersby. In the project description of Hemzemin we read: “It [the flagpole] governs its surrounding by standing vertically against the human body,” and “The work Hemzemin aims to replace the physical relation between human body and a flagpole by carrying a flagpole to the ground level.” Thus, the act of recasting the flagpole—recorded in the video documentation, an integral part of the work—is intended to correct the object’s relation to the human body within urban space and to subvert the aura of the sacrosanct conveyed by its verticality.
Günyol and Kunt are not alone in mistrusting verticality—their break with it connects up not least with discourse on art in public space since the 1960s, and reflects the (power-) political role played by these spaces that are in no sense neutral gaps in the city. Traditional forms of public-space art and the representative functions of monuments came in for intense criticism, for instance, in concepts such as the anti-monument and the counter-monument. Installations set into the ground, sometimes even inverted and extending down into it, almost seemed to invite one to overlook them.5 Similarly Hemzemin, which, rather than compete on “attention’s battlefield,”6 subtly deconstructs it. By rejecting oversize dimensions and the representational striving for height, the artists transform an everyday object that follows this logic as it has always done. Here, too, it is not so much that they generate new knowledge as link the work up to existing discourses, and divert them. Accessibility is quite physical in that one can walk on the object; and if the flagpole “governs” urban space, as Günyol and Kunt write, then the plate let into the ground is a plea, figuratively speaking, for more grassroots democracy.

“Is it a flagpole, or is it a sculpture?”: Shifts of Meaning in the System
Within anti-hierarchical and representation-critical approaches of this kind, Günyol and Kunt utilize images intensely charged with the history of ideas. The melting down of the metal mast at the foundry, as Hemzemin records with great visual power in its accompanying video, calls to mind the peace symbolism associated, say, with weapons being melted down. And rendering flags and flagpoles unrecognizable puts one in mind of flag burning, which in many countries, Germany for instance, is punishable as “defamation of the state and its symbols” (§90a German Criminal Code). These actions have immense symbolic value as iconoclastic acts against visual demonstrations of political power.
How does this pithiness accord with the restrained look of the end products, the agreeable aesthetic of works like f.skl.246 or Ceaseless Doodle, or with that of the steel plate of Hemzemin, so sparingly informative? What is the viewer’s primary perception? Freely adapting Max Imdahl, one might ask: “Is it a flagpole, or is it a sculpture?”7 Because what confronts us at the Hoher Wall is certainly not a “12 meter stainless steel flagpole”—what comes to mind perhaps is more Carl Andre’s metal plates. There is a tension between the (absent) original object and the end product (in the exhibition or public space) and it is augmented, inter alia, by the fact that the aesthetic form, in its reference to other works and its minimalist perfection, already has a claim to validity. Yet the transformation enters into the work as context, and the work’s reception, which at a first stage functions purely aesthetically via artistic references, subsequently includes the act of disassembling and transforming the flagpole—the transformation of a representative state symbol into a voided artistic sign that uninterruptedly references this transformation, the process of its own production and symbolism.

Thus, Günyol and Kunt’s works investigate the mechanisms of visual, linguistic, and material systems by subjecting them to manipulation and displacement. The clarity and expressivity of such actions results, not least, from a strong sense of focus: as in an experiment, parameters are altered individually, inducing alienation in a single move. Precisely this reduction and formal rigor makes the result a potential projection surface: the imaginary presence of what is absent, the original form, as well as a remarkable connectivity with cultural symbols, artistic and social discourses, and linguistic pictures unite in the smooth, minimalist aesthetic of the objects.

Last but not least, Günyol and Kunt succeed by these means in drawing attention to the hierarchies that constitute their immediate surroundings—for instance, in the exhibition space, the global injustices of an international art market dominated by Europe and North America that end up prohibiting non-Western artists access except under very specific conditions and marketable “labels”;8 in public space, the more direct address of inhabitants, passersby, a local public. Assuming that social order also manifests itself in its materially and visually experienceable surroundings and can permanently redefine itself therein, Günyol’s and Kunt’s works vouch for the political potential of aesthetic experience. Ultimately, in their combination of semantic concision and openness, the works aim at keeping open, at calling to mind, debates on the social construction(s) of identity, inclusion and exclusion, and their forms of representation within social systems and subsystems.

Notes

1 German “Flagge zeigen” (lit. “to show flag”). Trans.
2 246 according to the official list of country names and codes (ISO 3166), which also however includes countries not recognized by the UN.
3 Felix Ruhöfer, “Communication Systems in the Interplay of Design Processes in Society,” in Ars Viva 2012/13–Systeme/Systems, exh. cat. Neues Museum Nürnberg (Ostfildern-Ruit, 2012), pp. 107–18, at p. 108.
4 Europe as a locus of yearning and its deconstruction also play a role in Günyol’s and Kunt’s works, for instance in Avrupa-lı-laş-tı-r-abil-di-k-leri-m-iz-de-n-mi-sin-iz?, 2007.
5 A development that Sergiusz Michalski has described as follows: “In the mid-1960s, the widespread feeling that the status of the political public monument had been rendered meaningless resulted in a new art form: monuments which tried to attain invisibility as a way of engendering reflection on the limitations of monumental imagery,” in id., Public Monuments: Art in Political Bondage 1870–1997 (London, 1998), p. 172.
6 “Kampfort der Aufmerksamkeiten”—in Bogomir Ecker, “Pferdelogik und Gurkensalat,” in Public Art: Kunst im öffentlichen Raum, ed. Florian Matzner (Osfildern-Ruit, 2001), pp. 432–41, at p. 436.
7 “Is it a flag, or is it a painting?” Max Imdahl asked in his renowned essay of the same title on Jasper Johns’s Flag.
8 Particularly clear in f.skl.246 in the allusion to Richter, the “great German painter,” one of the world’s highest market value artists.

—————————

Hanna Magauer, M.A., is an editor at Texte zur Kunst and lives in Berlin. She studied art history, literature, and media studies at the University of Konstanz, University College Dublin, and Humboldt University of Berlin. Her Master thesis investigated artistic strategies of appropriation since the 1990s. She worked in several galleries and institutions, most recently at Gallery Nature Morte, Berlin. Her research focuses are the intersections of art and digital culture; artistic approaches to intellectual and material property; as well as conceptual art and institutional critique.

Bringing down the Flags
Über Fahnen und Fahnenmasten in den Werken von Özlem Günyol und Mustafa Kunt

Eine ebenmäßige Fläche unterbricht das Pflaster auf dem Gehsteig des Dortmunder Hohen Wall: eine quadratische Platte von etwa 1,5 m Seitenlänge, eingelassen in den Boden. Der dunkle, matte Stahl trägt auf den ersten Blick keinerlei Information. Sicherlich ein ästhetischer Störfaktor im regelmäßigen Muster der grauen Pflastersteine, doch ein äußerst zurückhaltender. Erst bei genauerem Hinsehen erfährt man durch eine Inschrift, dass es sich um einen „12 meter stainless steel flagpole“ handeln soll. Das Kunstwerk Hemzemin des türkischen Künstlerduos Özlem Günyol und Mustafa Kunt wurde im Rahmen ihrer Einzelausstellung von Mai bis Juli 2014 in der Nähe des Dortmunder Kunstvereins angebracht und offenbart hier nur das Endprodukt eines Prozesses, in dessen Zuge ein 12 m hoher Fahnenmast mitsamt der Unterkonstruktion, die ihn im Boden befestigen sollte, eingeschmolzen wurde, um zu einer etwa 1 cm dicken, 1,5 m breiten Platte gegossen zu werden; ein Video, das den Vorgang dokumentiert, ist in der Ausstellung zu sehen.

„Flagge zeigen“?: Die Repräsentationslogik der Fahne

Eine vergleichbare Arbeit des in Frankfurt lebenden und seit 2005 zusammenarbeitenden Künstlerduos stellt Flagpole (2007) dar. Bei diesem wurde ein handelsüblicher Fahnenmast aus Aluminium vor der Frankfurter Paulskirche aufgestellt und mithilfe eines Schweißgerätes zu einer abstrakten Figur verbogen. Flagpole bildet das erste Werk in einer Reihe von Arbeiten mit Fahnen und Fahnenmasten, die wohlgemerkt ein Jahr nach der Fußballweltmeisterschaft 2006 ihren Anfang nimmt: Ein signifikantes Datum, hat doch im Zuge dieser Veranstaltung  –  und auch in Zusammenhang mit der umstrittenen Medien-Kampagne „Du bist Deutschland“ (2005/2006), die auf ein positives Erstarken des deutschen Nationalgefühls zielte  –  der öffentliche Diskurs um das Zeigen der schwarz-rot-goldenen Flagge eine viel diskutierte Wende genommen, konnten die Deutschen nun doch „endlich wieder stolz sein“ auf ihre Staatsangehörigkeit und vor allem: Flagge zeigen. Die Verfremdung eines Fahnenmasts vor der Paulskirche, 1848 Schauplatz der Nationalversammlung, lässt sich unschwer als Kommentar auf diese wieder erstarkten Nationalgefühle lesen. Doch spielen die jeweiligen Nationalfarben selten eine Rolle in den Werken Günyols und Kunts, und auch andere Staatssymbole, wie in Hullabaloo Nationalhymnen oder in Ceaseless Doodle Umrisse von Landesgrenzen, treten meist nicht individuell auf, sondern in Masse, akkumuliert zu einem globalen Rauschen. In f.skl.246 (2009) sortierten die Künstler die Farben der 246 Nationalflaggen der Erde^[1] nach alphabetischer Ordnung der jeweiligen Ländernamen und druckten sie als abstrakte Anordnung horizontaler Streifen auf Baumwollpapier. Im Ergebnis, das Gerhard Richters Stripes-Serie zitiert, gehen die individuellen Landesfarben in polychromem Flimmern unter. Dabei blendet die alphabetische Ordnung auch machtpolitische Faktoren und Hierarchien zugunsten des Ästhetischen aus. Wenn diese doch wieder Einzug halten, dann durch eine formale Hintertür: Denn das Format des Bildes ist festgelegt durch das spezifische Seitenverhältnis der Flagge Ruandas, heißt es im Künstlerstatement zur Arbeit. In der Arbeit Flag-s (ebenfalls 2009), bei der die Farben der Flaggen aller Länder der Welt übereinander gedruckt wurden und das daraus resultierende Bild anschließend auf Stoff übertragen wurde, ist die Flagge Ruandas, verfremdet auf dem Kopf stehend, als einzige identifizierbar, da sie aufgrund dieses Seitenverhältnisses über die ansonsten schwarze Fläche hinausragt. Diese Herausstellung eines Landes, in dem Konflikte um nationale Zugehörigkeit zum Völkermord führten, wird als reines Ergebnis eines formalästhetisch festgelegten Regelwerks verschleiert. Ohne eine Aussage über spezifische politische Ereignisse zu treffen, über sie aufzuklären oder neues Wissen zu generieren, wird dennoch subtil unsere Aufmerksamkeit auf sie gelenkt.

Die „Durchdringung der Aspekte Medialität und Macht und deren Anbindung an das kulturelle, soziale und politische Verständnis von Identität in unseren heutigen gesellschaftlichen Formationen“^[2], die sich, wie Felix Ruhöfer schreibt, in den Arbeiten Günyols und Kunts offenbart, lässt sich am Beispiel der Flagge veranschaulichen. Deren Funktion als Nationalsymbol ist vielfältig: Sie bewegt sich von der Verteidigung territorialer Besitzansprüche über das Festigen von Grenzen bis hin zur Repräsentation und Kommunikation von Zugehörigkeit. Flaggen definieren visuell greifbar den Staat als Entität, manifestieren ein Innen und Außen – und erreichen identifikatorische Wirksamkeit u. a. über Farb- und Formsymbolik. Auch in Staatenbünden wie der Europäischen Union versichern sie eine gemeinsame Identität, ohne der Fragilität „gemeinsamer Werte“, den gewaltsamen Ausschlussmechanismen an ihren Grenzen und den existenziellen Bedingungen ihrer Einwohner/innen Rechnung zu tragen.^[3] Die Komplexität von weltweiten Mechanismen der Inklusion und Exklusion kulminiert, so könnte man sagen, in der auf den ersten Blick einfachen Symbolik der Flagge. In ihrer Materialität, im textilen Objekt wird diese Symbolik – man denke an die Sieges- und Aufbruchssymbolik wehender Fahnen –, über die zweidimensionale Ästhetik und der Wirkung hinausgehend verstärkt, und so ist es sicherlich kein Zufall, dass auch bei Flag-s ein textiles Trägermaterial gewählt wurde.

So ist auch ein Fahnenmast die materielle Verkörperung einer solchen Logik des Repräsentativen. Zum einen als Marketinginstrument etwa von Unternehmen genutzt, zum anderen vor allem von politischer Seite, etwa vor Rathäusern, Regierungsgebäuden oder Botschaften aufgestellt, erfährt die der Repräsentation und überhöhender Symbolik dienende Funktion des Fahnenmasts im Alltag wenig Beachtung. Sein Sinn und Zweck ist gewissermaßen der eines „Bildträgers“, der die Fahne in die Höhe befördert, dem Symbol zu großer Sichtbarkeit über den Köpfen der Menschen verhilft: „Its function is to fortify the represented image by carrying the image to an ‘inaccessible’ point“, so die Künstler. Das Verankern im Boden dient dabei nicht nur der Befestigung, sondern auch der deutlichen Markierung des (eigenen) Territoriums.

„Eins mit dem Grund sein“: Basisdemokratie für die städtischen Umgebung

An solche Aspekte der physischen Verankerung knüpft auch die Arbeit Hemzemin an, deren Titel, eine türkische Wortzusammensetzung, in etwa „eins mit dem Grund sein“ bedeutet. Das Material des ursprünglich in die Höhe strebenden Bildträgers wird nun also buchstäblich den Passant/innen zu Füßen gelegt. In der Projektbeschreibung zu Hemzemin heißt es: „It [the flagpole] governs its surrounding by standing vertically against the human body”, und weiter: „The work Hemzemin aims to replace the physical relation between human body and a flagpole by carrying a flagpole to the ground level.” Die Aktion der Umformung des Fahnenmasts – die in der Videodokumentation festgehalten und fester Bestandteil des Werks ist – soll demnach die Relation des Objekts zum menschlichen Körper innerhalb des öffentlichen Raumes korrigieren und die durch die Senkrechte transportierte Aura der Unantastbarkeit unterwandern.

Günyol und Kunt sind mit diesem Misstrauen gegenüber repräsentativer Vertikalität nicht allein: Der Bruch mit ihr knüpft nicht zuletzt an Diskurse der Kunst im öffentlichen Raum seit den 60er Jahren an und reflektiert die (macht)politische Rolle dieser Räume, die keineswegs neutrale städtische Leerstellen sind. Etwa im Begriff des Anti-Monuments oder Counter-Monuments wurde intensiv Kritik an den herkömmlichen Formen von Kunst im öffentlichen Raum und den repräsentativen Bestrebungen von Denkmälern geübt. In den Boden eingelassene, teils sogar invertierte und in ihn hineinragende Installationen strebten es nun nahezu an, übersehen zu werden.[4] Ähnlich auch Hemzemin, das im öffentlichen Raum als „Kampfort der Aufmerksamkeiten“^[5] nicht mit Monumentalität konkurriert, sondern diese subtil dekonstruiert. In Verweigerungshaltung gegenüber überdimensionalen Proportionen und repräsentativem Streben in die Höhe transformieren hier die Künstler jedoch ein Alltagsobjekt, das nach wie vor dieser Logik folgt: Auch hier wird also weniger neues Wissen generiert, als dass die Arbeit an bestehende Diskurse anknüpft und diese geschickt umlenkt. Zugänglichkeit wird dabei wörtlich als Begehbarkeit verstanden, und wenn ein Fahnenmast die städtische Umgebung „regiert“, wie Günyol und Kunt schreiben, dann plädiert die in den Boden eingelassene Platte, im übertragenen Sinne, vielmehr für Basisdemokratie.

„Is it a flagpole, or is it a sculpture?”: Bedeutungsverschiebungen im System

Innerhalb dieser antihierarchischen, repräsentationskritischen Ansätze operieren Günyol und Kunt mit Bildern von starker ideengeschichtlicher Aufladung. Das Einschmelzen des metallenen Masts, wie Hemzemin es durchaus bildgewaltig im dazugehörigen, in der Gießerei gedrehten Video widergibt, ruft Assoziationen an die Friedenssymbolik etwa des Einschmelzens von Waffen auf. Zudem lässt das Unkenntlichmachen von Fahnen und Fahnenstangen an Fahnenverbrennung denken, die in vielen Ländern, in Deutschland etwa als „Verunglimpfen des Staates und seiner Symbole“ (§ 90a dStGB) unter Strafe steht. Als ikonoklastische Aktionen gegen bildliche Demonstrationen politischer Macht sind es Handlungen hohen Symbolwerts.

Wie lässt sich diese Prägnanz mit dem zurückgenommenen Look der Endprodukte vereinen, der gefälligen Ästhetik von Werken wie f.skl.246 oder Ceaseless Doodle – oder der Stahlplatte Hemzemin, die kaum Informationen preisgibt? Was nimmt der/die Betrachter/in hier primär wahr? Frei nach Max Imdahl ließe sich hier fragen: „Is it a flagpole, or is it a sculpture?“[6] Denn es ist sicherlich kein „12 meter stainless steel flagpole“, der sich uns am Hohen Wall präsentiert; eher denkt man vielleicht an die Metallplatten Carl Andres. Zwischen dem (absenten) Anfangsobjekt und dem (in der Ausstellung oder im Stadtraum gezeigten) Endprodukt besteht eine Spannung, die nicht zuletzt dadurch verstärkt wird, dass die ästhetische Form in ihrer Referenz auf andere Werke sowie in ihrer minimalistischen Perfektion bereits Validität beansprucht. Doch die Verwandlung drängt als Kontext ins Werk, und die Rezeption, die in einem ersten Schritt rein ästhetisch und über künstlerische Referenzen funktioniert, inkludiert in der Folge auch den Akt der Demontage und Umformung des Fahnenmasts. Eine Transformation also von einem repräsentativen Staatssymbol zu einem scheinbar entleerten Kunstzeichen, das selbst stets auf diese Transformation, auf den eigenen Herstellungsprozess und dessen Symbolhaftigkeit verweist.

Günyol und Kunts Arbeiten untersuchen so die Mechanismen visueller, sprachlicher und materieller Systeme, indem sie diese Manipulationen und Verschiebungen aussetzen. Die Klarheit und Prägnanz der Aktionen resultiert nicht zuletzt aus einer starken Fokussierung; wie bei einer Versuchsanordnung werden nur einzelne Parameter verändert, die Verfremdung erfolgt in einem Schritt. Die Ergebnisse haben gerade in dieser Reduziertheit und in ihrer formalen Strenge das Potenzial zur Projektionsfläche zu werden: Die imaginäre Präsenz des Abwesenden, der ursprünglichen Form, wie auch eine bemerkenswerte Anschlussfähigkeit an kulturelle Symboliken, künstlerische und gesellschaftliche Diskurse sowie sprachliche Bilder versammeln sich in der glatten, minimalistischen Ästhetik der Objekte.

Nicht zuletzt gelingt es Günyol und Kunt so, auf die Hierarchien zu verweisen, die ihre unmittelbare Umgebung konstituieren: Im Galerieraum etwa auf globale Ungleichheiten eines internationalen Kunstmarkts, der unter der Dominanz Europas und Nordamerikas nichtwestlichen Künstlern schließlich nur unter ganz bestimmten Bedingungen und vermarktbaren „Labels“ Zugänge bereitstellt.[7] Im öffentlichen Raum als direktere Adressierung von Bewohner/innen, Passant/innen, einer lokalen Öffentlichkeit. Davon ausgehend, dass sich gesellschaftliche Ordnung auch in der materiell und visuell erfahrbaren Umgebung manifestiert und sich in ihr laufend neu definieren kann, stehen Günyols und Kunts Werke für das politische Potenzial ästhetischer Erfahrung ein. In ihrer Verbindung von semantischer Prägnanz und Offenheit zielen die Werke letztlich auf ein Offenhalten, ein In-Erinnerung-Rufen von Debatten über gesellschaftliche Konstruktionen von Identität, Inklusion und Exklusion, und deren Repräsentationsformen innerhalb sozialer Systeme und Subsysteme.

^[1]    246 Länder sind es gemäß der Liste offizieller Ländernamen und -codes (ISO-3166), worunter aber auch von der UN nicht anerkannte aufgeführt sind.

^[2]    Felix Ruhöfer, „Kommunikationssysteme im Spannungsfeld gesellschaftlicher Gestaltungsprozesse“, in: Ars Viva 2012/13 – Systeme/Systems, Ausst.Kat. Neues Museum Nürnberg, Ostfildern 2012, S. 107-118, hier: S. 108.

^[3]    Europa als Sehnsuchtsort und die Dekonstruktion desselben spielen auch in Günyols und Kunts Arbeiten eine Rolle, so etwa in Avrupa-lı-laş-tı-r-abil-di-k-leri-m-iz-de-n-mi-sin-iz?, 2007.

[4] „In the mid-1960s, the widespread feeling that the status of the political public monument had been rendered meaningless resulted in a new art form: monuments which tried to attain invisibility as a way of engendering reflection on the limitations of monumental imagery”, beschreibt Sergiusz Michalski diese Entwicklung. Sergiusz Michalski, Public Monuments. Art in Political Bondage 1870-1997, London 1998, S. 172.

^[5] Bogomir Ecker, „Pferdelogik und Gurkensalat“, in: Public Art. Kunst im öffentlichen Raum, hg. v. Florian Matzner, Ostfildern-Ruit 2001, S. 432-441, hier: S. 436.

[6] „Is it a flag, or is it a painting?“, fragt Max Imdahl in seinem berühmten gleichnamigen Aufsatz anlässlich Jasper Johns’ Flag.

[7] Insbesondere wird dies durch die Referenz auf Richter in f.skl.246 deutlich, der als „großer deutscher Maler“ zu den global marktstärksten Künstlern gehört.

Sensorial Détournement
Along the Magnitudes of Presence

All works of art are objects and should be treated as such, but these objects are not ends in themselves: They are tools with which to influence spectators. The artistic object, despite its seemingly object-like character, therefore presents itself as a link between two subjects, the creating and provoking subject on the one hand, and the receiving subject on the other. The latter does not perceive the work of art as a pure object, but as the sign of a human presence.

Asger Jorn, Detourned Painting

This seemingly complicated title aims to convey insight towards the artistic practice of Özlem Günyol and Mustafa Kunt. Collaborating for more than a decade, this artistic duo has been engaged in an in-depth investigation of grand narratives. Aiming to understand the world at large through elucidating the components of what makes the contemporary individual, Günyol and Kunt portray the forces that are at play. Unlike a scientist or a social theorist, they have been following indirect lines of thought, experimenting with the potential of something manifested as something else that still contains the information of the former in its full capacity. They have been employing a variety of methods in the course of the transformative processes. The procedures of codification, juxtaposition, translation, and classification emerge as subtexts to the outcomes of their practice. Instead of solely concentrating on the visual as their domain of investigation, they depict the sensorial, extending towards the aural and tactual stimulations. In the course of sonic entries, they not only include the sounds and voices, but also address the field of language as an asset to aesthetic experience. Günyol and Kunt investigate the relationship between symbols and concepts and their role in the formation of ontologies (of a person, a society, a culture); moreover they concentrate on the object as the conveyer of intrinsic meaning while aspiring to possibilities beyond.

Günyol and Kunt do not solely work within the containment of a specific media, they explore various means and mediums of production in line with the context they attend. The nature of their works differs according to the respective content. Their productions are spatialisations of their enquiry, resourcing its formal manifestation from the subject-matter. They might produce a large ceramic vase (Myth, 2013) carrying an engraved symbol of a rearing bull inhibited by white ropes, balanced by two lines of masks commodified in the graphic novel V for Vendetta, whilst characterising the dominating forces of contemporary society, more specifically European establishment. In a similar line of thought, they might address the demarcation of lines on the continent as an ever-changing puzzle (Untitled (from 1804 to 2006), 2006) and register national borders of the countries in the world as an obscure doodle, while cording them on an A4 size of paper (Ceaseless Doodle, 2009). They might suggest reading the daily news through images printed on newspapers headlines (What is on today, 2006) pasted on a gallery wall; or build a rope as an alternative symbol for resistance (…And Justice for all, 2010). While doing so, Günyol and Kunt fabricate their own language made of codes and symbols that emerge during the accumulation of an intricate web of relationships. They do not halt at the existing symbols, nor gratify themselves in decoding the existing trichotomy of signification. Instead, they introduce another layer, if not more, to their subject-matter. In this regard, when European Central Bank introduced the new series of Euro banknotes, Gunyol and Kunt determined to draw attention to the ongoing financial crisis, and mapped out the components of the new series. The portrait of Europa from Greek mythology utilizedas a security feature aspiring them to look into her ancient depictions. Instead of fetishising the image of Europa, they pronounced the symbol of Zeus -mostly portrayed alongside Europa, instituting a contextual bridging with the notion of power and sovereignty. Conserving the medium of ceramic vase, Gunyol and Kunt embedded points of entry to the viewer. Additionally, they make use of a common cultural trait, the story of the heroine Vendetta, through duplicating the infamous mask from the novel onto the surface of the vase. The introduction of the new Euro bank notes, and Günyol and Kunt’s quest in pressing the financial crisis across Europe lead them to the production of a ceramic vase. Their pursuit of nationhood brought them to the point of abstraction with the works, Ceaseless Doodle and Untitled (from 1804 to 2006), entangled issues of great consequence. In the aforementioned works, Günyol and Kunt juxtapose the methods of expansion and reduction, in which they primarily map out the associative relations of their subject, bringing back together to formation a statement activating those relationships. This process is not a singular equation of ‘a plus b equals c’, but rather a chain reaction of mental activities, associations and formations emerging as a body of its own. In this regard, they transform their subject into another body seemingly dissimilar to the initial subject, although closely related and even raising on its grounds. This topological unhinging enables subordination of the defining qualities of the subject-matter to another body. For instance in a sequential line up of works, they have depicted national flags as their subjects of intervention, concentrating on their material/physical features. The work entitled f.skl.246 (2009), is an inkjet print on cotton paper, which includes the colours of two hundred and forty-six national flags serialized according to the alphabetical order of the respective countries. f.skl.246 emerges as a barcode of human nations while Flag-s (2009), manifests a black-out in a post foregather of all flags in one frame. The process of layering and abstraction give force to the potential of Gunyol and Kunt’s practice to provide a critique of reason without committing a heteronomous violation of the autonomy of that aesthetic. In a way, the abstracted states of the two hundred and forty-six flags from all existing nations of the world, do not create a unifying image, but subliminally demarcates the notions of freedom, collective and individual identity, and belonging. Furthermore, by assigning an abstract mode of expression to the flags, the representative icons of nations, Günyol and Kunt introduce autonomy to their own body of work. The streamlines of autonomous semblance of their practice surface in their work entitled Hullabaloo (2009). Two hundred and sixty-six loudspeakers filter into one giant loudspeaker playing the national anthems of their respective nations. The choreography of the release of music conducts a canon, where the sequence is set to be half-time to its predecessor. While a jarring loud texture of sound is produced, the individual melodies disappear into the body of the cacophony. Not a single anthem exceeds the others that are heard in full length. The blending of emotionally charged social product triggers the questioning of collective and individual existence. Through delineating the notion of belonging, Günyol and Kunt tackle the concept of truth in the Adornian sense. In aesthetic theory, Adorno states that; “[a]utonomous semblance of art is precisely its sovereign truth.”i Their quest in the sovereign truth embodies itself in the piece entitled Perfect Couple (2010). The artist duo studied the Friedrich Ebert monument located at the façade of Paul’s Church in Frankfurt am Main. The monument was sculpted twice, before and after World War II, by the same artist Richard Scheibe. The earlier version of the monument differed from the later version, in which it portrayed Friedrich Ebert, the first president of Germany, as a strong and forceful person. Günyol and Kunt pronounce this unlikeness in the form of two same-sized photographs placed at the exact location of the later version. The speculative aspect of the authentic hand of the artist was brought forth while they investigated the mysterious shift in Scheibe’s artistic oeuvre (who was once affiliated with the National Socialist Government of the 1930’s). Within this specific piece, the concept of aesthetic negativity is the key to understanding the two-fold manifestation of the monument as a sovereign subversion of the rational, hence the subordination of truth.

Özlem Günyol and Mustafa Kunt’s artistic practice centralised under the rubric of deconstruction and the method of détournement. Deconstruction denies the possibility of a pure presence, essential or intrinsic and stable meaning – and thus a relinquishment of the notions of absolute truth, unmediated access to “reality” and consequently of conceptual hierarchy. Détournement is the integration of past or present artistic production into a superior construction of a milieu. The former conceptualised by the semiologist and philosopher Jacques Derrida, the latter by the members of Situationist International, the artist duo desired to employ these two methods at varying degrees. By collecting and disseminating the words used in political campaigns and in the respective party posters distributed across Germany (Spread the Word, 2012), Günyol and Kunt pronounced the attempts of deconstruction to separate the subversion of the successful functioning of the non-aesthetic discourses, such as political affiliations of a country, by alphabetically lining up the vocabulary that was brought to use. With their piece Fresh like the First Day (2011), they carried the method of deconstruction one step further disuniting the Turkish constitution to its basic components, such as the letters of Turkish alphabet, punctuation marks, and numbers. Fifty-three black books contained only a single component from the constitution, presented in their precise locations in the original text. Through deconstructing the constitution and reducing its weighty content to a sequence of symbols and signs, they distorted its deplorable loss. In other words, Fresh like the First Day, détourned the constitution to a varied aesthetic experience from the whole and its constituent parts. In a similar vein, the video piece entitled, On the stage (2010), the configuration of poses outsourced from protests inclined towards contemporary dance, where the dancer holds the poses in transition from one to the other. The isolated composition of movement disputed the aesthetic experience that it achieved from the particular claim to validity involved in the enactment. It attempts to conceive of this experience instead of as the object of a cognitive process.ii These two works solely focus on the production of politics through its components to attain a sensorial intrigue, and transform the context by means of decodification. This aspect is represented by BT028, CBT65, BT022 (2013) and Untitled (Series) (2010), where the former piece is the sonic codification of barbed wire, and the latter is a representation of military operations. Beyond the contextual détournament, these works employ the methodology of sensorial détournement, so that they all focus on the senses, experimenting with one sense at a time and its translation to another sense. In other words, BT028, CBT65, BT022 translates the corporeal into sonic, Untitled (Series) transform linguistic representation to iconographic presentation, and Myth transfers the visual into tactile. The sensorial détournement Günyol and Kunt apply is an inquiry to the reception of one thing sourced from something else that is that thing, but also not the same thing. On the line of simplicity that Guy Debord and Gil J Wolmaniii proposed, in their manifestation, A User’s Guide to Détournement from 1956, the artist duo filter their aesthetic attitude in accordance with the conscious or semiconscious recollection of the original contexts. By collecting referential symbols and inaugurating associative ones, Özlem Günyol and Mustafa Kunt seed familiar aspects and strangenesses into their body of work, while their juxtaposition sets the web of associations forward. Henceforth, in the heart of their artistic practice, content precedes form, and form exceeds content.

Notes

i Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, University Of Minnesota Press; 1 edition (August 12, 1998), p.152
ii Christoph Menke, The Sovereignty of Art, trans: Neil Solomon, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England, 1998 p.xiii
iii “The distortions introduced in the détourned elements must be as simplified as possible, since the main impact of a détournement is directly related to the conscious or semiconscious recollection of the original contexts of the elements.”
Source: http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/presitu/usersguide.html

—————————

Fatoş Üstek is an independent curator and writer, from Istanbul, currently based in London. She is Associate Curator for the 10th Gwangju Biennale, and guest tutor at Vision Forum, Linkopings Universitet, Sweden. She curated, amongst other projects, an opera in five acts at David Roberts Art Foundation (DRAF), London; the exhibition trilogy Now Expanded that took place at Kunstfabrik, Berlin; Tent, Rotterdam; and DRAF, London as well as various group shows in Europe and Turkey. She is member of AICA Tr and regular contributor to art publications such as Camera Austria International, Art Review, RES Art World / World Art. Üstek has written for international publications such as the 6th Momentum Biennial Reader, Borusan Art Collection and numerous artist catalogues. She acted as founding editor of Nowiswere Contemporary Art Magazine between 2008-2012, is the editor of the book Unexpected Encounters Situations of Contemporary Art and Architecture (Turkish Only, 2012) published by Zorlu Centre, Istanbul; and is the author of Book of Confusions, 2012, published by Rossi & Rossi, London.