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.

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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

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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.

Sensorisches Détournement
Entlang der Dimensionen von Präsenz

Alle Kunstwerke sind Objekte und sollten als solche behandelt werden, diese Objekte stellen jedoch für sich gesehen kein Ende dar: Sie sind Werkzeuge zur Beeinflussung von Betrachtern. Das künstlerische Objekt stellt sich trotz seines scheinbar objektähnlichen Charakters daher als Verbindung zwischen zwei Subjekten dar. Das schaffende und provozierende Subjekt auf der einen und das empfangende Subjekt auf der anderen Seite. Letzteres nimmt das Kunstwerk nicht als reines Objekt wahr, sondern als Zeichen menschlicher Präsenz.

                                               Asger Jorn, Detourned Painting

Der obige etwas kompliziert klingende Titel soll bereits einen ersten Hinweis auf die künstlerische Praxis von Özlem Günyol und Mustafa Kunt geben. Die beiden Künstler arbeiten seit mehr als einem Jahrzehnt zusammen und beschäftigen sich eingehend mit den großen Narrativen. In ihrem Bestreben, die Welt zu ergründen, und indem sie die Komponenten verdeutlichen, die dem Zeitgenössischen seine Individualität verleihen, bringen Günyol und Kunt die dahinter wirkenden Kräfte zum Ausdruck. Im Gegensatz zu Naturwissenschaftlern oder Sozialtheoretikern verfolgen sie in ihrem Denken einen indirekten Weg und experimentieren mit dem Potenzial von Phänomenen, die sich in etwas Anderem manifestieren, jedoch alle inhärenten Informationen dieses Anderen beibehalten. Im Zusammenhang dieser Transformationsprozesse bedienen sie sich unterschiedlichster Methoden. Als Subtext dieser Vorgehensweise setzen sie verstärkt auf Kodifizierung, Nebeneinanderstellung, Übertragung und Klassifizierung. Dabei konzentrieren sie sich nicht nur auf die Domäne des Visuellen, sondern stellen mit ihrer Kunst auch das Sensorische dar, einschließlich auraler und taktiler Stimuli. Die aurale Ebene beschränkt sich nicht nur auf Geräusche und Stimmen, sondern umfasst auch den linguistischen Bereich, um das ästhetische Erlebnis zu bereichern. Günyol und Kunt erkunden die Beziehung zwischen Symbolen und Begriffen und ihrer Rolle in der Bildung von Ontologien (einer Person, einer Gesellschaft, einer Kultur); überdies konzentrieren sie sich auf das Objekt als Träger einer immanenten Bedeutung, während sie nach Möglichkeiten jenseits davon suchen.

Die beiden Künstler arbeiten nicht nur innerhalb der Beschränkungen eines bestimmten Mediums; abhängig vom spezifischen Kontext erkunden sie vielmehr verschiedene Mittel und Produktionsmedien. Insofern verändert sich der Charakter ihrer Arbeiten in Relation zum entsprechenden Kontext. Ihre Arbeiten sind Verräumlichungen dieser Erkundungen, wobei sie versuchen, den formalen Wurzeln des speziellen Gegenstands auf den Grund zu gehen. Für ihre Arbeit Myth (2013) haben sie beispielsweise eine große Keramikvase hergestellt, die das eingravierte Bild eines sich aufbäumenden Bullen trägt, der mit weißen Stricken festgebunden ist. Darüber und unterhalb davon befindet sich jeweils eine Linie aus Masken, die der Graphic Novel “V für Vendetta” entspringen und die die herrschenden Mächte der Gesellschaft der Gegenwart symbolisieren sollen bzw. genauer gesagt des europäischen Establishments.

Ein ähnlicher Gedanke liegt auch Untitled (from 1804 to 2006) (2006) zugrunde. Hier werden die Grenzlinien auf dem europäischen Kontinent als sich fortwährend veränderndes Puzzle dargestellt. Ceaseless Doodle (2009) hingegen zeigt die Grenzen der Länder unserer Erde als wirre Kritzelei, die auf einem DIN A4 Blatt Papier festgehalten wurden. Im Falle von What is on today (2006) plädieren die beiden Künstler dafür, die täglichen Nachrichten in Form von Bildern zu lesen, die über die Schlagzeilen der Zeitungen gedruckt und an die Wände der Galerie geheftet wurden, oder als alternatives Symbol des Widerstands ein Seil zu knüpfen wie in …And Justice for all (2010).

Günyol und Kunt haben im Laufe ihres künstlerischen Werdegangs eine eigene Sprache aus Codes und Symbolen kreiert, die in ihrem komplizierten Netz aus Beziehungen in Erscheinung treten. Weder bedienen sie sich existierender Symbole, noch geben sie sich mit der Dekodierung der existierenden Trichotomie von Bedeutung zufrieden. Anstatt dessen fügen sie dem thematischen Gegenstand einer Arbeit eine weitere Ebene hinzu. Als die Europäische Zentralbank beispielsweise die neue Serie von Banknoten vorstellte, richteten Günyol und Kunt ihr Augenmerk auf die andauernde Finanzkrise und bildeten einzelne Komponenten dieser neuen Serie ab.

Das Konterfei von Europa aus der griechischen Mythologie, welches als Sicherheitsmerkmal der Banknoten verwendet wird, hat sie dazu inspiriert, alte Darstellungen von Europa zu betrachten. Anstatt jedoch ihr Bild zu fetischisieren, wählten sie ein Bild von Zeus, der zumeist neben Europa dargestellt wurde, um den kontextuellen Bezug zu Macht und Herrschaft herzustellen. Im Falle der Keramikvase haben Günyol und Kunt mögliche Zugangspunkte für den Betrachter integriert. Überdies haben sie ein bekanntes kulturelles Bild aufgenommen, die Geschichte der Heldin Vendetta – und die berüchtigte Maske aus dem Roman auf der Oberfläche der Vase reproduziert. 

Die Einführung der neuen Euro-Banknoten haben Günyol und Kunt, in ihrem Bestreben auf die europaweite Finanzkrise hinzuweisen, als Anregung aufgegriffen, eine Keramikvase herzustellen. Ihre Beschäftigung mit nationalen Identitäten hat sie in diesem Zusammenhang im Falle von Ceaseless Doodle und Untitled (from 1804 to 2006) bis an die Abstraktion herangeführt, um die undurchsichtige aber wichtige Problematik darzustellen. In den zuvor erwähnten Arbeiten stellen Günyol und Kunt die Methoden von Erweiterung und Reduktion nebeneinander und bringen hier in erster Linie die assoziativen Bezüge zum Thema zum Ausdruck, wobei sie diese zu einem Statement formen, dass diese Assoziationen aktiviert. Dieser Prozess beruht nicht auf der einfachen Gleichung “A plus B ist C”, sondern vielmehr auf einer Kettenreaktion der geistigen Aktivitäten, Assoziationen und Gestalten, die für sich selbst existieren. Insofern übertragen die beiden Künstler ihr Thema auf einen anderen Körper, der dem ursprünglichen Motiv scheinbar unähnlich ist, jedoch mit diesem eng verwandt ist und sogar auf dem gleichen Untergrund steht. Dieser topologische Transfer ermöglicht die Unterordnung der bestimmenden Eigenschaften des Subjekts auf einen anderen Körper. So zeigen Günyol und Kunt beispielweise in einer fortlaufenden Linie von Arbeiten Nationalflaggen als Subjekte von Interventionen und konzentrieren sich dabei auf deren physische Beschaffenheit.

Bei der Arbeit mit dem Titel f.skl.246 (2009) handelt es sich um einen Tintenstrahldruck auf Baumwollpapier, der in alphabetischer Reihenfolge die Farben der 246 Nationalflaggen der entsprechenden Länder abbildet. f.skl.246 gleicht einem Barcode der Nationen, während Flag-s (2009) mit seiner Schwärze alle Flaggen in einem Bild verschmilzt. Der Prozess der Überlagerung und Abstraktion verleiht der künstlerischen Praxis von Günyol und Kunt die Kraft für eine Vernunftkritik, ohne eine heteronome Verletzung der Autonomie der Ästhetik zu begehen. In gewisser Hinsicht erzeugen die abstrahierten Staaten (246 Flaggen aller existierenden Nationen der Welt) kein vereinheitlichtes Bild, sondern verweisen auf subtile Weise auf Aspekte von Freiheit, kollektiver und individueller Identität und Zugehörigkeit. Durch den gewählten abstrakten Ausdrucksmodus der Flaggen, die nationale Symbole darstellen, stellen Günyol und Kunt die Autonomie der Arbeit als Kunst sicher.

Der Nachhall des autonomen Scheins ihrer Praxis kommt in ihrer Arbeit mit dem Titel Hullabaloo (2009) zum Tragen, für die 246 Lautsprecher in einem riesigen Lautsprecher zusammengeführt werden, der die Nationalhymnen der entsprechenden Nationen abspielt. Die Musik ist als Kanon choreografiert, wobei die Abfolge darauf beruht, dass jeweils zur Hälfte der vorherigen Hymne eingesetzt wird. Auf diese Weise entsteht ein misstönender Klangteppich und die einzelnen Melodien gehen in der Kakophonie unter. Keine einzige Hymne geht über die anderen hinaus, die jedoch alle in voller Länge abgespielt werden. Diese Überblendung emotional aufgeladener Melodien wirft die Frage von kollektiver und individueller Existenz auf. Durch das Heraufbeschwören der Vorstellung von Zugehörigkeit bringen sie auch den Begriff von Wahrheit im Sinne Adornos ins Spiel. In seiner Ästhetischen Theorie schreibt Adorno, dass der autonome Schein der Kunst gerade aus seiner souveränen Wahrheit besteht.[1] Ihre Suche nach souveräner Wahrheit kommt in der Arbeit Perfect Couple (2010) zum Tragen. Die beiden Künstler hatten sich mit dem Friedrich-Ebert-Denkmal an der Fassade der Paulskirche in Frankfurt am Main beschäftigt. Die Figur wurde zweimal durch den Künstler Richard Scheibe, einmal vor und einmal nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg, hergestellt. Die zuerst entstandene Figur unterschied sich von der späteren Version, hier hatte er Friedrich Ebert, als erstes frei gewählte Staatsoberhaupt von Deutschland, als starke und kraftvolle Person dargestellt. Günyol und Kunt unterstreichen diese Unähnlichkeit in der Form von zwei gleichgroßen Fotografien, die exakt am Aufstellungsort der späteren Version platziert wurden. Der spekulative Aspekt der authentischen Handschrift des Künstlers wird durch die Untersuchung jener mysteriösen Verschiebung in Scheibes künstlerischem Werk (der sich in den 30er Jahren den Nazis angeschlossen hatte) angedeutet. Im Falle dieser Arbeit ist der Begriff der ästhetischen Negativität der Schlüssel zum Verständnis der zweifachen Darstellung als souveränen Subversion des Rationalen und damit der Unterordnung von Wahrheit.

Die künstlerische Vorgehensweise von Günyol und Kunt beruht auf Dekonstruktion und Détournement. Dekonstruktion verneint die Möglichkeit reiner Präsenz oder einer grundlegenden oder immanenten oder stabilen Bedeutung; sie verwirft die Vorstellung von absoluter Wahrheit, unvermitteltem Zugang zur “Realität” und somit von konzeptueller Hierarchie. Détournement (dt. Zweckentfremdung) ist die Aufnahme früherer oder gegenwärtiger Kunstwerke in die übergeordnete Konstruktion eines Milieus. Die Dekonstruktion geht auf den Semiologen und Philosophen Jaques Derrida zurück, Détournement auf die Situationistische Internationale. Günyol und Kunt versuchen diese beiden Methoden auf unterschiedliche Weise einzusetzen.

Für Spread the Word (2012) haben sie die in politischen Kampagnen und auf Parteiplakaten in Deutschland verwendeten Begriffe zusammengetragen und durch Dekonstruktion das erfolgreiche Funktionieren des nicht-ästhetischen Diskurses wie der politischen Zugehörigkeit eines Landes untergraben, indem sie das verwendete Vokabular alphabetisch aufgelistet haben. Mit Fresh like the First Day (2011) gehen sie mit der Dekonstruktion noch einen Schritt weiter und brechen die türkische Verfassung in ihre Einzelteile auf und zwar in die Buchstaben des türkischen Alphabets, Satzzeichen und Zahlen: 53 schwarze Bücher, jedes enthält nur ein Element der Verfassung, dessen exakte Position im Originaltext angegeben wird. Durch die Dekonstruktion der Verfassung und die Reduzierung ihres bedeutungsschweren Inhalts auf eine Reihe von Symbolen und Zeichen wird der bedauerliche Verlust in seiner Bedeutung verzerrt. Mit anderen Worten Fresh like the First Day ist ein Détournement der Verfassung in ein vielfältiges ästhetisches Erlebnis des Ganzen und seiner konstituierenden Teile. Auf ähnliche Weise präsentiert das Video On the stage (2010) körperliche Posen von Protesten, die an zeitgenössischen Tanz erinnern, wobei die Tänzer in einer Pose innehalten bevor sie zur nächsten übergehen. Die Komposition der vereinzelten Bewegungen entkoppelt das ästhetische Erleben von der Aussagekraft, die jede Aufführung einfordert. Anstatt dessen wird das Erlebnis als Objekt eines kognitiven Prozesses präsentiert.[2]Diese beiden Arbeiten fokussieren lediglich auf die Produktion von Politik durch ihre Komponenten und erzeugt damit etwas sinnlich Ansprechendes während der Kontext durch Dekodierung verwandelt wird. Dieser Aspekt ist auch den Arbeiten BTO-28, CBT-65, BTO-22 (2013) und Untitled (Series) (2010) zu eigen. Erstere ist die akustische Kodierung von Stacheldraht und die zweite Arbeit eine Darstellung von militärischen Operationen. Jenseits ihres kontextuellen Détournements beruhen diese Arbeiten auch auf einem sensorischen Détournement, welches auf die Wahrnehmung zielt, wobei es auf experimentelle Weise nacheinander unterschiedliche Sinne anspricht und sie somit jeweils auf die anderen überträgt.

BTO-28, CBT-65, BTO-22 überträgt das Körperliche auf das Akustische. Bei Untitled (Series) wird die linguistische in eine ikonografische Darstellung verwandelt und Myth überträgt das Visuelle ins Taktile.

Das sensorische Détournement, wie es Günyol und Kunt betreiben, ist die Erkundung der Wahrnehmung der einen Sache, die einer anderen Sache entspringt, die sich von der ursprünglichen Sache unterscheidet und doch ihr gleich ist. In Übereinstimmung mit den Ideen von Einfachheit wie sie Guy Debord und Gil J Wolman[3] 1956 in ihrem Manifest A User’s Guide to Détournement formulierten, nehmen Günyol und Kunt ihre ästhetische Haltung in Entsprechung mit der bewussten oder unbewussten Erinnerung des ursprünglichen Kontexts wahr. Durch das Zusammentragen von referentiellen Zeichen und der Einführung assoziativer Zeichen nehmen Özlem Günyol und Mustafa Kunt vertraute und unvertraute Aspekte in ihre Arbeiten auf, während die Nebeneinanderstellung das Assoziationsgefüge zusätzlich anregt. Im Kern ihrer künstlerischen Praxis geht der Gehalt der Form voraus und die Form übersteigt den Gehalt.

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Fatoş Üstek ist freie Kuratorin und Autorin aus Istanbul und lebt aktuell in London. Sie war Co-Kuratorin der zehnten Gwangju Biennale und Gastdozentin am Vision Forum der Linkopings Universitet, Schweden. Unter anderem kuratierte sie eine Oper in fünf Akten an der David Roberts Art Foundation (DRAF) in London; die Ausstellungs-Trilogie Now Expanded, die in der Kunstfabrik, Berlin stattfand; im Tent, Rotterdam; und in der DRAF, London sowie diverse Gruppenausstellungen in Europa und der Türkei. Sie ist Mitglied der AICA, Türkei und schreibt regelmäßig Beiträge für Kunst-Publikationen wie Camera Austria International, Art Review, RES Art World / World Art. Üstek schrieb für internationale Publikationen wie den Reader der Momentum Biennale, der Borusan Kunst Sammlung und zahlreiche Künstler Kataloge. Sie ist eine der Gründungs-Herausgeberinnen des Buches „Unexpected Encounters Situations of Contemporary Art and Architecture“ (Turkish Only, 2012) herausgegeben vom Zorlu Centre, Istanbul; zudem ist sie Autorin des Book of Confusions, 2012, herausgegeben von Rossi & Rossi, London.

[1] Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, University Of Minnesota Press; 1 edition (August 12, 1998), S.152

[2] Christoph Menke, The Sovereignty of Art, MIT Press, 1998, S. xiii

[3] “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.“ Quelle: http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/presitu/usersguide.html

The Collective Construction of Reality and its Potential for Change
A Tour of the Exhibition “Özlem Günyol & Mustafa Kunt”

Sandra Dichtl

The three themes of the exhibition—the symbolic representation of power, territorial borders and their attendant exclusion, and the materiality and symbolism of money—are one and all current political and social issues. Debates around the financial crisis or the violent struggles stemming from territorial aspirations to growth or autonomy dominate today’s news. What Özlem Günyol & Mustafa Kunt present to us is not a direct indictment of social and political grievances, but universally shared power-political and sociopolitical constructions and their encryptions.

The artists’ ludic-aesthetic approach shows that precisely these signs and codes are socially constructed and hence can also be changed. This approach of the two artists born in Ankara in 1977 and 1978 comprises a lightness of touch that precludes their assuming a normative, or judgmental, not to say polemical, stance. Their work has a signature that is plain and non-arbitrary, playful almost, deliberately not hermetic or obscure, but accessible and easily understood. The two artists favor working with clearly differing and varying processes, since in their eyes always to work with one medium risks prioritizing medium over content.

A statement of the artists’ aims might run: to think more openly and complexly the interspaces that arise in trying to define and establish identities. The two artists work in depth with the construction and manipulation, loss and alteration, of identities collectively understood, and demand and/or promote skepticism of the supposed self-understanding and codifications of identity. The various issues and themes and their artistic implementation have their roots not least in the biographies of Özlem Günyol & Mustafa Kunt, both of whom began their studies in the sculpture department of Hacettepe University in Ankara. Mustafa Kunt then proceeded to the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main, where he studied under Wolfgang Tilmans, who ran a non-applied art course there, finally graduating under Willem de Rooij, for whom not only motifs and themes are important but also broader sociopolitical and (art-)historical contexts. Özlem Günyol likewise last studied at the Städelschule, under Ayse Erkmen, who became known for her sculptures and art projects in public space.

Özlem Günyol & Mustafa Kunt created a work titled Hemzemin as a public space installation in Dortmund. For this sculpture reminiscent of Carl Andre’s metal plates the artists transformed a 12-meter-long flagpole into a flat object measuring 1.5 x 1.5 meters that is level with and part of the ground for the length of the exhibition. In respect of the flagpole, the work adapts it to its environment, which it otherwise surmounts and sometimes, as a flag-bearer, aesthetically and symbolically dominates. A video work on view in the exhibition space records the segmenting and melting down of the stainless steel pole, including its positioning in the sidewalk of the Hoher Wall in Dortmund. The title of the work is a compound of two originally Persian words that have entered the Turkish language: Persian ham (Turkish hem) meaning “one,” “together,” “equal”; and Persian zamin (Turkish zemin) meaning “ground,” “earth,” “floor.” Hence, an approximate translation of hemzemin might be “to be together on common earth and ground.” The flagpole recurs frequently in the works of Günyol & Kunt. While in the work Flagpole (2007) the artists “snapped” a flagpole in Frankfurt, presenting the resultant abstract form in the exhibition space as an ironic self-parody, the flagpole in Hemzemin becomes a mysteriously shining plaque in the ground over which more or less attentive passersby walk daily. Dortmund currently seems to be the right place for the abasing of this power symbol. Only two days before the exhibition opened, twenty neo-Nazis stormed a post-election party being held at the Dortmund city hall by representatives of the democratic parties. With pepper sprays and glass bottles the rightwing extremists attacked democratic politicians attempting to block their path.¹

In the work Flagpole,St. Paul’s church in Frankfurt—seat of the first German parliament—was the site of an engagement with flagpoles as symbols of national affiliation. Following this historical reminiscence, it may be a contemporary “recollection”—of the German banking metropolis and its thriving, imperious finance operations—that lies behind works around the symbolism and materiality of money. For the artists have lived in Frankfurt am Main ever since studying at the city’s Städelschule. Apart from which, radical economic insecurity has increasingly begun to infiltrate art production, also as a subject of artworks. It is precisely the countries that have been strongly hit by the crisis and their artists who have begun to take a stand, not least in the context of big art events. Stefanos Tsivopoulos, for example, staged his three-part video installation History Zero (2013) in the Greek Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale. It highlighted the political and social situation of the debt-ridden country by means of an African migrant scrap-metal gatherer, an aged woman art collector who turns euro banknotes into origami blossoms, and an artist with tablet computer in search of motifs and inspiration who becomes a tourist among the wretched. Further, a heterogeneous display in the Pavilion entrance area presented thirty-two alternative currency, exchange, and economic models ranging from the bitcoin “hacker” currency to development-aid hype and microcredits. Currently, at the first anniversary of escalating protest over the development of Gezi Park in Istanbul, Özlem Günyol’s & Mustafa Kunt’s home country has again become the scene of demonstrations against corruption, economic dominance, and power-political ambitions. In this sense, too, their works around this topic both reflect their own origins and influences as well as global political and social events. The work Untitled (2014), likewise presented in Dortmund for the first time, consists of a pedestal onto which have been stacked plates of congruent format made of tin, copper, zinc, nickel, brass, aluminum, and steel—the materials, in other words, used to produce euro coins.

Formally speaking, an aesthetically attractive rigor runs through the artists’ works as a unifying theme. In the case of Untitled, this rigor is abundantly evident in the plain yet trenchant design of its pedestal onto which, as in earlier works, the metal plates are flush mounted to present a compact cube. If it is an aesthetic that tends to convey distance, not least for the viewer, this distance appears all the more fractured in the video works such as that accompanying Hemzemin, or in Game. In this latter work, a euro coin rolls uninterruptedly without toppling over. The proverbial “ruble is rolling”² and becomes a symbolic, precious-metal “hologram.” There is also a reference here to Christopher Nolan’s movie Inception of 2010. In the movie, a spinning top becomes the sign of a dream state, while one that has toppled over symbolizes reality. The uncertainty in Game as to whether the rolling coin ultimately stops or not holds the viewer’s thoughts and interpretations in a state of suspense, the entire financial system quasi-rotating before his eyes in the symbolic image. Scheinbogen consists of the seven colors of the seven euro banknotes from 5 to 500 euros. The colors have been taken from the specimen notes on the European Central Bank website and—starting with the 5-euro note and increasing in value—positioned diagonally next to each other so that they call to mind a rainbow. The rainbow, a magnificent spectacle of nature, has left its trace in the cultural history of mankind, appearing as a motif in countless artworks from Caspar David Friedrich and Joseph Anton Koch to Peter Paul Rubens. The title Scheinbogen³ contains several meanings: the German word Schein can refer to the sheen of a rainbow, to a banknote, but it can also mean a mirage or illusion.

The artist book State Paintings of 2008 presents twenty-four enlarged details of line patterns taken from international passports. Apart from security elements used internationally, these are distinct motifs, ornaments, and scripts in the watermarks that are designed to emphasize the particular character of each nation. Optically beguiling ornamentation and the intricacy of the security systems are plain to see here. State Paintings is a large, white book placed on an info stand and may only be touched and leafed through by viewers wearing white cotton gloves. This can be seen as a humorous allusion to the didactic presentational modes that are sometimes met with in historical museums.

In addition to the obligatory travel and ID documents, Özlem Günyol & Mustafa Kunt have also been engaging in their works with state and/or country boundaries for a good while. In the wall work Ceaseless Doodle the outlines, or borders, of all the states/countries of the earth have been superimposed to form a confused maze of lines like a ball of wool reminiscent of a sketched globe consisting of nothing but pencil strokes.

Using music the artists have also addressed and symbolically fractured boundary security techniques: BTO-28, CBT-65, BTO-22 set to music, as it were, three international types of NATO razor wire that differ in blade shape. To begin with, an interjected “Ouch!” was recorded and the resultant sound-clip used to create a graphic module based on the blade shape of the wire; subsequently, via a computer program, the module was converted into a musical score. Finally, the notes were translated into the acoustic of string instruments to produce sounds that are replete with tension. Günyol & Kunt’s styles of presentation and representation, therefore, range all the way from ironically fractured didactic intervention (State Paintings) to the subtly encrypted aestheticization of horror in musical razor wire: “This type of barbed wire is known in German as ‘S-wire,’ or ‘Z-wire,’ ‘razor wire,’ or ‘NATO wire,’ because it was introduced to Germany by the NATO ally the USA and for many years was used exclusively for military purposes.”⁴

Günyol & Kunt’s deconstruction and contextually pointed reorganization of signs and codes is not so much aimed at a truth of the political as at the “politics of truth.”⁵ The concept of the “politics of truth,”⁶ coined by Michel Foucault, denotes a social ordering of truth that generates recognized technologies and procedures for producing and establishing this truth and that is also invariably bound up with specific power relations. Power and knowledge are interwoven in the organization and production of facts and their interpretation: “However, above all, one sees that the core of critique is basically made of the bundle of relationships that are tied to one another, or one to the two others, power, truth, and the subject. And if governmentalization is indeed this movement through which individuals are subjugated in the reality of a social practice through mechanisms of power that adhere to a truth, well, then I will say that critique is the movement by which the subject gives himself the right to question truth on its effects of power and question power on its discourses of truth. Well, then, critique will be the art of voluntary insubordination, that of reflected intractability. Critique would essentially insure the desubjugation of the subject in the context of what we could call, in a word, the politics of truth.”⁷

In this sense, too, it is clear that Günyol & Kunt are not polemically critical in their works, take no unequivocal stand; instead, they employ subliminal deconstruction and subsequent reconstruction to break through perceptual and mental schemata, in doing which they not only open up new ways of seeing but also critical reflection upon them and, ultimately, their change in the encounter with symbols, signs of power, and codes of promulgated truth.

Notes

¹ See http://blog.zeit.de/stoerungsmelder/2014/05/26/neonazis-ueberfallen-wahlparty-im-dortmunder-rathaus_16406 (04.06.14, 10:52)

² German proverb “der Rubel rollt” (lit. the ruble is rolling) meaning “business is doing well.” Trans.

³ Scheinbogen, a neologism based on the German Regenbogen (rainbow). Trans.

⁴ http://www.s-draht.de/produkte/sicherheitsdraht/sicherheitsdraht.htm

⁵ The artist and author Hito Steyerl has been foremost in addressing the subject of documentarisms for years. See Hito Steyerl, “Politik der Wahrheit: Dokumentarismen im Kunstfeld,” springerin 03 (2013), “Reality Art”; and Hito Steyerl, Die Farbe der Wahrheit: Dokumentarismen im Kunstfeld (Vienna, 2008).

⁶ Michel Foucault, “Technologien der Wahrheit,” in Jan Engelmann (ed.) Foucault–Botschaften der Macht: Reader Diskurs und Medien (Stuttgart, 1999), pp. 133–44.

⁷ Michel Foucault, “What is Critique?” in id., The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvere Lotringer, trans. Lysa Hochroth (New York, 1997), pp. 23–82, at pp. 31–32.

Sandra Dichtl: Die kollektive Konstruktion von Realität und ihr Potenzial zur Veränderung – ein Rundgang durch die Ausstellung „Özlem Günyol & Mustafa Kunt“

Die drei Themenfelder der Ausstellung – die symbolische Repräsentation von Macht, territoriale Grenzen und damit verbundene Ausgrenzung sowie die Materialität und Symbolik von Geld – sind allesamt aktuelle politische und gesellschaftliche Themen. Debatten um die Finanzkrise oder die gewaltsamen Kämpfe aufgrund territorialer Wachstums- und Autonomiebestrebungen dominieren die gegenwärtigen Nachrichten. Was uns Özlem Günyol & Mustafa Kunt vor Augen führen, ist keine direkte Anklage der gesellschaftlichen und politischen Missstände, sondern allseits geteilte macht- und gesellschaftspolitische Konstruktionen und deren Codierungen.

Es ist die spielerisch-ästhetische Herangehensweise der Künstler, die uns verdeutlicht: Es sind ebenjene Zeichen und Codes, die gesellschaftlich konstruiert und damit veränderbar sind. Die Herangehensweise der beiden 1977 und 1978 in Ankara geborenen Künstler behält sich eine Leichtigkeit vor, welche sie von normativen, also wertenden oder gar polemischen Haltungen abgrenzt. Die Handschrift ihrer Arbeiten wirkt schlicht und unwillkürlich, fast spielerisch und bewusst nicht hermetisch und sperrig, sondern ist leicht zugänglich und verständlich. Die beiden bevorzugen hinsichtlich der Arbeitsprozesse deutliche Differenz und Variation, da in ihren Augen ein Arbeiten mit der immer selben Technik das Medium vor den Inhalt treten lassen könnte.

Ein Plädoyer der beiden Künstler könnte lauten: Die Zwischenräume, die beim Versuch der Definition und Etablierung von Identitäten entstehen, offener und komplexer zu denken. Sie arbeiten sich ab an der Konstruktion und Manipulation, dem Verlust und Wandel der als kollektiv verstandenen Identitäten und fordern bzw. fördern eine generelle Skepsis gegenüber dem vermeintlichen Selbstverständnis und der Festschreibung von Identität. Entsprechende Fragestellungen und Themen sowie deren künstlerische Umsetzung gründen nicht zuletzt in der Biographie von Özlem Günyol & Mustafa Kunt: Beide studierten zunächst in der Skulptur-Abteilung der Hacettepe Universität in Ankara. Mustafa Kunt setzte sein Studium an der Frankfurter Städelschule bei Wolfgang Tillmans fort, der dort eine Klasse für Freie Kunst leitete, und schloss schließlich bei Willem de Rooij ab, dem nicht nur Motive und Themen, sondern auch die breiteren sozialpolitischen und (kunst-)historischen Kontexte wichtig sind. Özlem Günyol studierte zuletzt ebenfalls an der Städelschule, bei Ayse Erkmen, die mit Skulpturen und Projekten im öffentlichen Raum bekannt wurde.

Als Installation im öffentlichen Raum Dortmunds schufen Özlem Günyol & Mustafa Kunt eine Arbeit mit dem Titel Hemzemin. Für die an Carl Andrés Platten erinnernde Skulptur wurde ein 12 m langer Fahnenmast in ein flaches, 1,5 x 1,5 m großes Objekt transformiert und ist nun für die Dauer der Ausstellung gleichhoch dem Boden ein Teil desselben. Hinsichtlich des Masten ist es ein Akt der Anpassung an dessen Umgebung, die er für gewöhnlich überragt und zuweilen auch ästhetisch-symbolisch (als Fahnenträger) dominiert. In den Ausstellungsräumen zeigt eine Videoarbeit den Prozess der Zerteilung und Schmelze des Edelstahlmastens – bis hin zur Verlegung der aus ihm entstandenen Metallplatte in den Dortmunder Fußgängerweg am Hohen Wall. Der Titel der Arbeit bildet sich aus zwei zusammengesetzten Wörtern, die ursprünglich aus dem Persischen stammen und ins Türkische übernommen wurden. Persisch: ham (im Türkischen: hem) bedeutet: eins, zusammen, gleich – und Persisch: zamin (im Türkischen: zemin) bedeutet: Grund, Erde, Boden. Eine Übersetzung des Wortes Hemzemin könnte demzufolge sinngemäß lauten: zusammen sein auf einem gemeinsamen Grund und Boden. Der Fahnenmast ist ein häufig wiederkehrendes Symbol in den Arbeiten von Günyol & Kunt: Wurde unter dem Werktitel Flagpole (2007) ein Mast in Frankfurt von den beiden Künstlern „abgeknickt“ und die daraus resultierende abstrakte Form als eine ironische Parodie seiner selbst im Ausstellungsraum präsentiert, wird der Mast bei Hemzemin zu einer mysteriös glänzenden Bodenplatte, über die alltäglich mehr oder weniger aufmerksame Passanten laufen. Diese symbolische Erniedrigung eines Herrschaftssymbols erscheint in Dortmund aktuell am richtigen Ort, denn nur zwei Tage nach der Eröffnung dieser Ausstellung stürmten rund 20 Neonazis die Wahlparty der demokratischen Parteien im Dortmunder Rathaus. Mit Pfefferspray und Glasflaschen attackierten die Rechtsextremisten demokratische Politiker, die sich ihnen in den Weg stellten.[1]

In Frankfurt war bei Flagpole die Paulskirche – Tagungssitz des 1. Deutschen Parlaments – der Ort der Auseinandersetzung mit Fahnenmasten als Repräsentanten nationaler Zugehörigkeit. Nicht auszuschließen, dass es nach dieser historischen Reminiszenz nunmehr eine zeitgenössische ist – nämlich das florierende und dominierende Finanzgeschäft in der deutschen Bankenmetropole – die zu Arbeiten inspiriert, welche sich mit der Symbolik und Materialität des Geldes befassen. Die Künstler leben nämlich, seit ihrem Studium an der dortigen Städelschule, in Frankfurt am Main. Abgesehen davon beginnt die radikale ökonomische Verunsicherung zunehmend auch durch ihre Thematisierung in die Kunstproduktion hineinzuwirken. Es sind gerade die stark von der Krise betroffenen Länder und ihre Künstler, die auch im Rahmen großer Kunstereignisse Stellung beziehen. So zeigte Stefanos Tsivopoulos im griechischen Pavillon der 55. Biennale von Venedig die dreiteilige Videoinstallation History Zero (2013). Diese vergegenwärtigte die politische und wirtschaftliche Situation des verschuldeten Landes anhand eines Altmetall sammelnden afrikanischen Migranten, einer betagten Kunstsammlerin, die aus Euroscheinen Origamiblüten faltet, und eines Künstlers, der mit seinem Tablet-Computer, auf der Suche nach Motiven und Inspiration, zum Elendstouristen wird. Parallel dazu präsentierte im Eingangsbereich des Pavillons ein heterogenes Panorama 32 alternative Währungs-, Tausch- und Wirtschaftsmodelle, die vom Hackergeld Bitcoin bis zum Entwicklungshilfe-Hype der 2000er-Jahre, den Mikrokrediten reichten. Aktuell, anlässlich des einjährigen Jubiläums der eskalierten Proteste gegen die Bebauung des Gezi-Parks in Istanbul, ist das Heimatland von Özlem Günyol & Mustafa Kunt erneut Schauplatz von Demonstrationen gegen Korruption, der Dominanz der Ökonomie und machtpolitischer Bestrebungen. Ihre Arbeiten zum Thema Geld reflektieren wohl auch in diesem Sinne ihre eigene Herkunft und Prägung, doch ebenso die globalen politischen und gesellschaftlichen Geschehnisse. Die in Dortmund ebenfalls erstmals präsentierte Arbeit Untitled (2014) besteht aus einem Sockel, auf dem in passgenau gleichem Format Platten aus Zinn, Kupfer, Zink, Nickel, Messing, Aluminium und Stahl aufgeschichtet sind; sprich die Materialien, die bei der Herstellung von Euro-Münzen verwendet werden.

Formal ist es eine ästhetisch attraktive Strenge, die sich wie ein roter Faden durch die Werke der Künstler zieht. Im Fall von Untitled zeigt sich diese insbesondere in der schlichten und doch einprägsamen Gestaltung des Sockels, denn wie schon bei vorangegangenen Arbeiten schließen auch hier die Metallplatten bündig mit dem Sockel ab, präsentiert sich ein kompakter Quader. Vermittelt solcherlei Ästhetik eher Distanz, auch beim Betrachter, bricht sich diese umso mehr in den Videoarbeiten, die jener zu Hemzemin oder jene namens Game. Letztere zeigt eine Euromünze, die sich kontinuierlich dreht ohne umzufallen. Sprichwörtlich „rollt hier der Rubel“ und wird zu einem edelmetallenen, symbolischen „Hologramm“. Zudem besteht eine Referenz zum Film „Inception“ von Christopher Nolan aus dem Jahr 2010. Dort wird ein sich unaufhörlich drehender Kreisel zum Zeichen für einen Traumzustand, ein umgefallener hingegen für die Realität. Die Ungewissheit, ob in Game das Kreiseln schlussendlich stoppt, lässt die Überlegungen bzw. Interpretationen des Betrachters in der Schwebe, während sich in diesem symbolischen Bild gleichsam das gesamte Finanzsystem vor seinen Augen rotiert.

Scheinbogen besteht aus den sieben Farben der sieben Eurobanknoten im Wert von 5 bis 500 Euro. Die Farben sind den Euroschein-Mustern auf der Webseite der europäischen Zentralbank entnommen und – ausgehend vom 5-Euroschein im Geldwert aufsteigend – diagonal nebeneinander gesetzt, wobei die Darstellung an einen Regenbogen denken lässt. Regenbögen haben als beeindruckendes Naturschauspiel in der Kulturgeschichte der Menschheit ihre Spuren hinterlassen und tauchen in unzähligen Kunstwerken als Bildmotiv auf, von Caspar David Friedrich über Joseph Anton Koch bis hin zu Peter Paul Rubens. Der Titel Scheinbogen ist mehrdeutig: Er bezieht sich auf den Lichtschein des Regenbogens, den Geldschein, aber auch auf den Schein im Sinne eines Trugbildes, einer Täuschung.

Das Künstlerbuch State Paintings von 2008 zeigt 24 Makroaufnahmen von Sicherheitslineamenten in internationalen Reisepässen. Abgesehen von international verwendeten Sicherheitselementen, handelt es sich um individuelle Motive, Ornamente und Schriften in den Wasserzeichen, die den speziellen Charakter der jeweiligen Nation betonen sollen. Eine optisch verführerische Ornamentik und zugleich das ausgeklügelte Sicherungssystem werden hier unmittelbar deutlich. Als großes, weiß gebundenes Buch findet State Paintings seinen Platz auf einem Informations-Pult und darf von den Betrachtern nur mit Baumwollhandschuhen angefasst und durchgeblättert werden. Dies kann als ein augenzwinkernder Verweis auf die ansonsten aus historischen Museen bekannte didaktische Präsentationsform gesehen werden.

Neben den obligaten Reise- und Identitätsdokumenten, widmen sich Özlem Günyol & Mustafa Kunt in ihren Werken schon seit Längerem auch den Staats- bzw. Ländergrenzen. In der Wandarbeit Ceaseless Doodle, übersetzt „endloses Gekritzel“, werden die Konturen, sprich Ländergrenzen aller Staaten der Erde zu einem wirr anmutenden Geflecht von Linien in Form eines Knäuels verdichtet, der an eine allein aus Strichen gezogene bzw. bestehende Weltkugel denken lässt.

Des Weiteren werden von den beiden Künstlern auch die Methoden der Grenzsicherung thematisiert und symbolisch gebrochen. In diesem Falle mit den Mitteln der Musik, denn BTO-28, CBT-65, BTO-22 „vertont“ sozusagen drei international eingesetzte Nato-Stacheldraht-Typen, die sich durch die Form ihrer Klingen voneinander unterscheiden. Zunächst wurde hierfür der Ausruf „Ouch“ aufgenommen und der Soundclip dann als Grundlage für die graphische, an die Form des Klingendrahtes angelehnte Gestaltung eines Moduls herangezogen, das sich mit Hilfe eines Computerprogramms in eine Partitur umsetzen ließ. Diese Notation wurde dann in die Klänge von Streichinstrumenten übersetzt, was einen spannungsvollen Klang ergibt. Somit reicht das Spektrum an Präsentations- und Repräsentationsformen bei Günyol & Kunt von der ironisch gebrochenen didaktischen Intervention (State Paintings) bis hin zur subtil verschlüsselten Ästhetisierung des Grauens, einem klingenden Stacheldraht: „Im Deutschen wird dieser Typ Stacheldraht ‚S-Draht‘, ‚Z-Draht‘, ‚Klingendraht‘ oder NATO-Draht genannt, da er vom NATO-Verbündeten USA nach Deutschland eingeführt worden ist und über viele Jahre ausschließlich im Militärbereich verwendet wurde.“[2]

Durch die Dekonstruktion und kontextuell pointierte Reorganisation von Zeichen und Codes wird durch Günyol & Kunt nicht auf eine Wahrheit des Politischen abgezielt, sondern die „Politik der Wahrheit“ dechiffriert.[3] Der Begriff der „Politik der Wahrheit“[4] wurde von Michel Foucault geprägt, und bezeichnet eine gesellschaftliche Ordnung der Wahrheit, die anerkannte Techniken und Verfahren zur Produktion und Feststellung dieser Wahrheit hervorbringt und die immer auch mit spezifischen Machtverhältnissen verknüpft ist. Macht und Wissen verschränken sich in der Organisation und Herstellung von Fakten und deren Interpretation: „Vor allem aber sieht man, daß der Entstehungsherd der Kritik im wesentlichen das Bündel der Beziehungen zwischen der Macht, der Wahrheit und dem Subjekt ist. Wenn es sich bei der Regierungsintensivierung darum handelt, in einer sozialen Praxis die Individuen zu unterwerfen – und zwar durch Machtmechanismen, die sich auf Wahrheit berufen, dann würde ich sagen, ist die Kritik die Bewegung, in welcher sich das Subjekt das Recht herausnimmt, die Wahrheit auf ihre Machteffekte hin zu befragten und die Macht auf ihre Wahrheitsdiskurse hin. Dann ist die Kritik die Kunst der freiwilligen Unknechtschaft, der reflektierten Unfügsamkeit. In dem Spiel, das man die Politik der Wahrheit nennen könnte, hätte die Kritik die Funktion der Entunterwerfung.“[5]

Auch in diesem Sinne wird deutlich, dass Günyol & Kunt durch ihre Arbeiten nicht polemisch kritisieren, nicht eindeutig Stellung beziehen, sondern mit unterschwelliger Dekonstruktion und anschließender Rekonstruktion Wahrnehmungs- und Denkschemata durchbrechen und damit nicht nur neue Sichtweisen, sondern auch deren kritische Reflexion und schließlich Veränderung in der Begegnung mit Symbolen, Zeichen der Macht, Codes verlautbarter Wahrheit eröffnen.

[1]
                  [1] Siehe http://blog.zeit.de/stoerungsmelder/2014/05/26/neonazis-ueberfallen-wahlparty-im-dortmunder-rathaus_16406 (04.06.14, 10:52)
 

[2] http://www.s-draht.de/produkte/sicherheitsdraht/sicherheitsdraht.htm

[3] Den Dokumentarismen widmet sich seit Jahren vor allem die Künstlerin und Autorin Hito Steyerl. Siehe Hito Steyerl: Politik der Wahrheit. Dokumentarismen im Kunstfeld, in: springerin 03/2013, Reality Art; sowie Hito Steyerl: Die Farbe der Wahrheit.  Dokumentarismen im Kunstfeld, Wien 2008.

[4] Michel Foucault: Technologien der Wahrheit, in: Jan Engelmann (Hg.): Foucault – Botschaften der Macht. Reader Diskurs und Medien. Stuttgart 1999, S. 133-144

[5] Foucault, Michel (1992): Was ist Kritik? Berlin: Merve Verlag.

Özlem Günyol & Mustafa Kunt

Özlem Günyol ve Mustafa Kunt, 2005 yılından bu yana birlikte çalışıp üreten iki sanatçı. İşlerinin bel kemiğini oluşturan kimlik meseleleri, sosyal politika, sınırlar üzerinden adalet kavramını ve sistemin her bir parçasını liğme liğme edip dönüşüme uğratıyorlar. Kültürel kodları bağlamlarından koparıp soyutladıkları işlerin söylemleri net ve kuvvetli bir zemine sahip.

Hacettepe Üniversitesi’ndeki sanat eğitiminizin ardından çalışmaya başladınız ve tüm işlerinizde ikinizin ismini görüyoruz. Birlikte çalışma ve iş üretme sürecine nasıl başladınız? Bu süreç nasıl ilerliyor?
Frankfurt’a yerleştikten sonra birbirimizin bireysel çalışmaları üzerine daha çok tartıştığımız bir sürece girdik. Bu tartışmaların zaman içerisinde üretim ve hatta fikir aşamasında gerçekleşmeye başlaması sonucunda fikrin ya da çözümün kime ait olduğu gitgide bulanıklaşmaya başladı ve böylece ortak çalışma kararı aldık. İlk calışmamızı 2003 yılında gerçekleştirdik fakat bireysel çalışmalarımız 2007 yılına kadar devam etti. 2007 yılında Frankfurt Basis’te gerçekleşen ilk büyük kişisel sergimiz Be-cause’un kurumu ve bu sergi için ortaklaşa yaptığımız projeler sonrasında beraber çalışma ve üretim biçimimiz devamlılık kazandı.

Fikir ve üretim aşamasında ne gibi çatışmalar yaşıyorsunuz? İşlerinizi hayata geçirirken kim daha kararlı?
Yeni bir projenin hemen hemen her aşamasında çatışmalar yaşıyoruz. Ama insan bireysel çalışırken de benzer çatışmaları kendi içerisinde yaşıyor zaten. Beraber çalışınca bu durum ikiyle çarpılıyor diyebiliriz. Üretim aşamasında ikimizden birinin daha kararlı olması bir projeyi sonlandırmıyor. Böyle olsaydı ona ortak çalışma diyemezdik zaten. Projeler ikimizin karar verdiği noktada bitiyor. Eğer anlaşamadığımız noktalar olursa o projeyi bir süre rafa kaldırıyoruz. Bu şekilde bekleyen birçok projemiz var.

Frankfurt’a yerleşme kararını nasıl ve neden aldınız? Ne zaman yerleştiniz?
Hacettepe’de aldığımız eğitimin son derece klasik olması bizi başka okulları araştırmaya yöneltti. 2001 yılının şubat ayında gerçekleştirdiğimiz kısa bir Almanya gezisi sırasında Städelschule’yi ziyaret etme şansımız oldu ve hemen sonrasında da Städelschule’ye başvurduk. 2001 yılının sonbaharından beri Frankfurt’ta yaşıyoruz.

Kimlik politikalarıyla ilgili birçok işiniz var, aynı zamanda sınırlar, haritalar ve birçok kontrol mekanizmasını da sorguluyor ve dönüştürüyorsunuz. ‘Yabancı’ olmaya oradan bakmak, Türkiye’ye ‘yabancı’ olup dışarıdan bakabilmek pratiğinizi ne yönde etkiliyor?
Aslında, yurt dışı olsun – olmasın, kişi içerisinde bulunduğu toplumda, sürekli yeniden tanımlanıyor, sınıflandırılıyor. Yurt dışında olmanın getirisi ve aynı zamanda bizden götürdükleri, bu durumu hızlandırılmış bir kurs şeklinde yaşamak oldu. Bu sürecin sonucunda oluşan farkındalık hem yaşantımızı hem de çalışmalarımızı etkiledi.

Star Clusters’da apoletlerdeki yıldızları bulundukları yere, gökyüzüne iade ediyorsunuz. Spread the Word’de siyasi parti söylemlerini / sloganlarını bulundukları bağlamdan koparıyorsunuz. Fakat sonunda, özgürleşen bu kavramlar yine bir sanat işinin içinde, ya da bir mekanda tekrar başka bir şekilde sınıflandırılıyor ve şekle giriyorlar. Spread the Word, aslında bunun çok farkında olan bir iş, çünkü bağlamından kopardığı cümleleri anonimleştiriyor. Tüm bunların tamamen bağımsızlaşacakları bir nokta var mı sizce? Ya da o nokta, üstüste gelen harita (Ceaseless Doodle) ve bayraklarda (Flag-s) olduğu gibi, bu imgelerin aynı mekanda yer alarak veya tekrar ederek anlamını yitirdiği nokta mı?

Ceaseless Doodle ve Flag-s işlerinde tekrar eden şey imgeler değil, eylemler. Ceaseless Doodle’da bütün ulusal sınırlar üst üste çizildi, Flag-s’da ise bütün ulusal bayraklar ink-jet printer yardımıyla aynı kağıdın üzerine üst üste basıldıktan sonra ortaya çıkan sonuç kumaşa aktarıldı. Bu çalışmalarla ülke sınırlarını ve bayrakları bir arada sunarak onların anlamlarını kaybettiriyoruz.

Star Clusters işi 2005 yılında yaptığımız Scenes projesine daha yakın. Star Clusters’da bir özgürleşme/rahatlama söz konusu değil. İş karanlık bir ayna gibi çalışıyor: İzleyici işe yaklaşırken gördüğü şey siyah bir kare, işe yaklaştıkça aynı zamanda o siyah karenin içerisindeki kendi yansımasına da yaklaşıyor ve ancak yeterince yaklaştığında yıldız kümelerini fark ediyor. Aslında kendi yarattığın evrenine bakmak gibi bir şey bu… İş bu gerilim üzerinden çalışıyor. Spread the Word çalışması ise Almanya’daki politik partilerin son yıllarda kamusal alanda asılmış olan seçim afişlerinde kullandıkları söylemlerden yola çıkılarak yapıldı. Yaklaşık 60 kadar söylemi içeren çalışma için, bu söylemlerde kullanılan bütün kelimeler kendi bağlamlarından çıkarılarak alfebetik bir düzen içerisinde sergilendi. Böylece herbir kelime kendi bağımsızlığını kazanmış oldu. Fakat bu bağımsızlığın söylemlere bağımlı bir bağımsızlık olduğunu da unutmamak lazım. Çünkü bütün bu kelimeler, Almanya’daki politikanın gündemi ve davranış şekli hakkında istatistiksel bilgi veren bir index de oluşturuyor.

Proje, yukarıda bahsettiğimiz kelimeler indexinin yanı sıra her bir kelime için özel olarak üretilmiş binlerce küçük boyutlu baskı, yüzlerce konfeti tabancasından oluşuyor ve izleyicileri indexteki kelimeleri kullanarak kendi söylemlerini oluşturmaya davet ediyor. Aslında bizim yaptığımız bir şeye bağımsızlık kazandırmaktan çok söyleyeceğimiz şey icin bağımsız bir platform yaratmaya çalışmak.

Communication Systems in the Interplay of Design Processes in Society

In considering the heterogeneous artistic practice of Özlem Günyol and Mustafa Kunt, it seems helpful to look at the social and cultural contexts that their art encompasses, rather than to orient oneself based on formal models for the production of a work. A central theme in their joint work seems to be the examination of media communicated images and systems of signs, as well as links between linguistic and visual experience. How these affect the collective and individual differentiation of identities, which are shaped and mediated by cultural and social conditions, is a theme that is inherent in their art. It also touches on questions regarding the representation of power within subject formation in the media, and illustrates this in a lucid and extremely multifaceted formal working method. In their works of recent years, the power theoretical connection between the production and reception of images in our everyday culture plays a prominent role. The examination of linguistic forms of communication in the media also becomes visible as a central element in their art, despite the fact that Gü̈nyol and Kunt’s innovative practice makes it difficult to clearly separate specific thematic areas from one another. As a result, their works reveal 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 today.

In addition to the conceptual approach, what also becomes visible again and again in Günyol and Kunt’s work is how a unique characteristic of art—the aesthetic experience— is revealed as a central point of concentration. The works, which are linked to complex social questions, also function in their conceptual orientation as a challenging aesthetic experience. They thus refer to the potential of contemporary art to generate meaning beyond our media shaped everyday experience as a system of signs without having to refer back to written, or purely textual intermediaries. In Günyol and Kunt’s work, art shows itself to be a discipline that makes reference to a broadly based sensual field, and thus facilitates a separate form of access to our environment. What becomes evident in their works is how formal aesthetic aspects take on significance within their working method while at the same time critically examining social themes.

The works of the artist duo can be structured into loose groups of works that invoke linguistic, gestural, symbolic, and purely visually characterized intermediaries. Nonetheless, these systems of communication repeatedly overlap within their artistic practice and frequently produce intersections or form associative connections within the particular works. The significance and function of linguistic mediation has already played a central role in the works of Günyol und Kunt for a number of years.

The work with the Turkish title, Avrupalılaştırabildiklerimizdenmisiniz? (2006), for example, is based on a play with words that is able to generate a complex, grammatically correct and multifaceted statement from one word through appending prefixes, suffixes, or appendixes. School children in Turkey use this game as a language exercise. The root of the word Avrupa—in English “Europe”— is used here as an initial form from which new meanings and questions are formulated by adding additional word fragments. By appending the syllable “lı” to Avrupa, meaning “Europe,” one gets the English word “European,” Avrupalı, while adding a further suffix, in turn, means “to become European,” Avrupalılaş. By means of further additions, the root Avrupa can thus become a construction that would be formulated in English as a sentence, and in translation have the meaning: “Are you one of those who we were able to make become European?” Avrupalılaştırabildiklerimizdenmisiniz?

Avrupalılaştırabildiklerimizdenmisiniz? was first placed on the outside wall of a building in the multi-cultural area surrounding Frankfurt am Main’s train station—in an effort to reach the Turkish-speaking population—as a twenty- six-meter-long lettering. The highly controversial debate taking place in Germany and Turkey about whether Turkey belongs to Europe thus—as a semantic game—becomes an open call to question cultural, political, and social localization in Turkey, in Germany, and in particular in that part of the city characterized by migrants in which the work was presented.

The work, moreover, also raises the question of historical, political, and cultural belonging on a fundamental level and inspires consideration of how the ideas of participation, affiliation, and difference have to be renegotiated again and again in Germany and Turkey, as well as in diverse social fields.

In the work Fresh Like the First Day, developed in 2011, the significance of linguistic mediation for the constitution of communities and the genesis of value systems also becomes visible. The installation work consists of fifty-three books bound in black and displayed for visitors to look at and read, in an area that is part of the work. Each of the books has a letter from the Turkish alphabet, a punctuation mark, or a number that is used in the Turkish Constitution of 1982 embossed in gold on the front side on a black ground. Each of the characters used in the constitution is isolated in one of the fifty-three books from all the others and presented in exactly the same position on the page on which it is located in the text as a whole. What is thus created is a convolution that is shaped by omissions and empty spaces forming strangely abstract structures.

Fresh Like the First Day was developed during a stay in Istanbul and is typical of how Günyol and Kunt work. The motivation for developing this work is based on the debate about the extensive changes to the Turkish Constitution that were adopted by the military government in 1982, a debate that came to a provisional end as the result of a referendum in 2010 in which the majority of the Turkish population voted in favor of the proposals of the ruling party. In Fresh Like the First Day, in a simple process of deconstruction, the consecutive text of the Constitution becomes a differentiated index of signs in fifty-three volumes, which in their entirety have a value that is constitutive for Turkish society. Through this act of dissection, what opens up in the work is a space of thought and association that questions the significance of signs and their function as an element that is constitutive for society. The isolated letter loses its semantic meaning when it is not integrated within a context of a differing system of signs. The obvious use of metaphorical aspects in thework of Günyol and Kunt, who frustrate all naive comparisons through such usage, is shown, or so it seems, in the empty spaces and gaps that the alleged text in the individual volumes of Fresh Like the First Day exhibits. The installation encourages graphic consideration of the factors that constitute society. Is it rigid systems, like a text, that makes this possible, or is it the interplay of the individual and the collective that gives momentum to the open spaces to be defined in order to facilitate participation and community?

The work When the justice properly works, then there is no room for compassion (2010) brings together a linguistic form of communication with a historically rigidified gestural one concealed behind it. Formally rigorous in its arrangement, the work consists of a vitrine standing on a base with the same basic dimensions. The black vitrine with its glazed upper side, sits on the lacquered white base and contains fifty-nine accurately sharpened pencils laid out next to one another. A letter or punctuation mark is imprinted in gold paint on each of the pencils so that it is possible to read the title of the work. The sentence When the justice properly works, then there is no room for compassion, which serves as the title, refers to a common practice of judges in Turkey, as well as other countries, of publicly breaking the pen with which a death sentence judgment was signed. Those who do not find such judgments ethically acceptable, despite being required by the legal situation, follow this practice. The symbolic act is expressed in the field of tension that arises between the state function of the judge and subjective assessment of the judgments he or she issues. In this sculptural work, what becomes particularly visible is the strategy that the artist duo often employs of staging the inherent quality of aesthetic experience through evocatively and metaphorically charging it. The formal rigor of the work, as well as the hermeticism, with which the pencils— precisely positioned and distanced from the viewer by means of a massive pane of glass—are presented is associated with the negation of scope for action, although the symbolic reaction of breaking the pencil is still allowed as a minimal, subjective form of articulation
vis-a-vis the government. The experience of the work and the social background to which the work refers, as well as the associative relationships that are established between these two parameters, form a lucidly choreographed setting.

The work …AND JUSTICE FOR ALL! (2010) consists of a twenty-two-meter-long rope with a diameter of approximately five centimeters, which is uniformly illuminated and accurately rolled up into a loose circle on a base. The precision with which the rope was worked is also obvious to laypeople as a result of the tight twists and the precisely knotted and fixed ends. There is a certain relationship of tension between this clearly expert production technique and the relatively low-quality material, which calls to mind simple linen or woven fabric. Although a rope is allegedly presented here as art in the sense of a readymade, doubt nonetheless remains with respect to whether this rope is actually alienated from a functional purpose—the material seems too soft to have been visibly taken to the limits of its resilience through stretching and twisting. Moreover, within the twisted material, intense green, yellow, orange, and blue fields of color stand out and impart a rhythm that punctuates the beige and ocher shades of the rest of the material.

Closer examination of the object intensifies the doubt about an existence of the rope that is exclusively oriented towards functionality since a brief comment on it explains that the rope was originally a protest banner bearing the lettering that serves as the title, …AND JUSTICE FOR ALL! What becomes apparent here is the goal of staging confusion beyond the production of a rope, confusion based in the change of material properties, and thus the processing of a cloth banner into a rope. The transformation of a banner into a rope initially makes reference to a process that can be understood as an alienation of the original functional context and, therefore, devalues it. At the same time, the object is now positioned in a new semantic field: art.

If the banner served to communicate a political message or social demand that was supposed to be addressed in public, the rope now shows itself to be an object that is in the position to initiate a holistic pattern of thought. It seems as if the work’s ability to provide a link to social issues is carried out and leaves the pure-object character of the work behind. And on this reading, an associative possibility for reading the rope, which can now also be interpreted as a tether, in turn evokes questions regarding the mechanisms of justice and the power relationships that stand behind them. Can the rope be understood as a functional symbol of the cohesion of social groups? Can the rope be understood as an image of interconnectedness and thus communication, which is able to generate connections, social exchange, and belonging? And as a result of the process of transforming a banner into a rope, is the thought pattern of a textual approach to social questions not pushed forward to become a metaphorical, and thus universal, non-linguistic level of expression?

The function and presence of gestural systems of communication, as they are generally experienced by being mediated through the media, forms the thematic starting point for the two works On the Stage (2010) and Persuasion Exercises (2011). Conceived during the election campaign in Ankara in 2011 as a public space site-specific work, Persuasion Exercises illustrates the varied gestures of a male individual acting in isolation in front of a white background in seventeen posters, executed in black and white on a billboard. The basis for the posters was an actor engaged by Günyol and Kunt who rehearsed the gestures in front of the camera and finally acted out one final pose for each gesture from campaign posters and from politicians from the local election campaign. Using their gestures and the presence before the camera, politicians attempt to convey a specific image in order to embody conviction, strength of purpose, seriousness, and other attributes that seem to be of importance in campaigning for political office. Through deliberately isolating the protagonist in front of a white background and the subsequent reintegration in the public space shaped by the propaganda images of the political parties, the billboard first has the effect of an abstract, sketch-like image of the scarcely scrutinized gestures of candidates for political offices. In combination with the campaign posters, however, the wall located on one of the main transport axes in Ankara developed a subversive potential since the gestures themselves—but not their design executed in black and white rows—made a formal closeness to the political image compositions visible. The mechanism of convincing through using purely gestural means of expression and the presence of these gestures mediated by the media, as well as the interchangeability of the individuals who are active and the contents that are presumably behind them, reveal the multiply fractured relationship between our superficial attention economy and the dominance of media staged gestures in the public space—the physical as well as the virtual.

These gestures and poses staged in the public space within the context of government responsibility stand opposite a non-government oppositional form of mediating physical movement, patterns, and gestures in the video work On the Stage. In the short film a dancer invited by the artists rehearses poses borrowed from photographs of actual demonstrations with concentrated intensity before a black background. The academic, professional, and intense way in which the dancer rehearses the mostly spontaneous gestures presents a clearly perceptible contrast to the movement patterns of masses of individuals as they become visible in the case of demonstrations.

In On the Stage, the field of tension between spontaneous and deliberately rehearsed gestures provides an alternative visual accessibility to the problematic transformation of the physical presence of the protagonist, who performs a reenactment of the gestures of demonstrators, and breaks them down into an isolated symbolic character. In the reduced representation, the pose is no longer visible as a reaction to the contents of statements, but is instead presented as a purely visual and physical symbol beyond any thematic significance. Compared with the staged media presence of political images as questioned in Persuasion Exercises, in On the Stage gesture
appears as an expressive sign that radiates activity and dynamism from within itself. Paradoxically, outside of content-related fields of meaning, both types of gestures function as a reference to the difficulty of classifying form and content within instances of mediation. At the same time, the two works address the complex compression of media perceived signs as a trigger for our attention.

Specifically within the context of current discussions about the utility of art, the works of Günyol and Kunt are clearly located in an intermediate position between engaged and explicitly socio-critical art, and efforts to facilitate creative articulations of an autonomous sphere of responsibility beyond functional or social questions. With regard to a hasty classification of their art within a political orientation, the works favor of a regime of visibility, which Jacques Rancière would position as a basis for political as well as artistic spheres of activity. Rancière attempts to attribute a position of resistance to art, a position that is not based on a transcendence of our modes of experience, but rather sets down the distinctive features of aesthetic visual experience with respect to the political and social spheres of our actions. For him, politics is always fundamentally an order that divides our world and subordinates particular aspects. Assumed in this theory is the resistance of the individual in order to define this order anew again, and again as a speaking being. Art fulfills the role of keeping the resistance potential open without embodying it itself. Rancière identifies art here not as a bearer of resistance and reclassification, but rather as an open space for reflecting on the fundamental possibilities of resistance and reflexive access to existing systems.1The sensitive question of how art—without making a political statement through clearly taking a pro or contra position and thus, according to Rancière, becoming politics itself— can still continue to maintain an independent status vis-a-vis the political is fundamentally anchored in Özlem Günyol and Mustafa Kunt’s working method.

As becomes apparent in the interpretations of the works, within the context of their critical and artistic references, the artist duo looks directly at experienced differences between various models of individual and collective understanding of identity, and how they are mediated through the media. Contemplation of which construction mechanisms for culturally and historically shaped disciplining authorities in various cultures, and how value systems influence the individual again and again, forms the starting point for their lucid, artistic activities. Those artistic activities understand how to articulate statements about our present world for society as a whole without negating the intrinsic value of aesthetic experience as a productive empirical model.

1 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, ed. and trans. by Gabriel Rockhill (New York, 2004).

Özlem Günyol / Mustafa Kunt – Sorular

Neylan Bağcıoğlu: N.B.: Eğitiminizden bahsedebilir misiniz? Frankfurt’ta yaşıyor ve çalışıyorsunuz? Orayı seçmenizin özel bir sebebi var mı?

Özlem Günyol: İkimiz de Ankara Hacettepe Üniversitesi Heykel Bölümü’nü 2001 yılında bitirdikten hemen sonra Frankfurt’a gittik. Aslında bizim Ankara’dan ayrışımızın nedeni, akademideki klasik anlayıştan kaçmaktı. Frankfurt’a gitmemizin nedeni ise Städelschule’ydi. Ben, Ayşe Erkmen ile disiplinlerarası sanat okurken, Mustafa da Wolfgang Tillmans ile özgür sanat üzerine çalıştı. Bunun yanında Mustafa aynı zamanda Mainz’daki Johannes Gutenberg Üniversitesi’nde de okudu. Ama Mainz’daki bir sanat akademisi ve Ankara’daki klasik anlayış başka bir şekilde burada da mevcut. Bu nedenle okulu tamamlamadı.

N.B.: Nasıl iş birliği yapmaya başladınız?

Mustafa Kunt: Aslında bu planladığımız bir şey değildi. Başlangıçta birbirimizin projeleri üzerine konuşuyorduk. Zaman içinde bu konuşmalar tartışmalara dönüşmeye başladı. İlk ortak işimizi 2003 yılında davet edildiğimiz bir sergi için yaptığımız tartışmalar sonucunda gerçekleştirdik. Bu sergiden sonra 2 yıl kadar bireysel çalışmalarımıza devam ettik. Sonrasında 2005 yılında “Scenes”, “Foreignness” ve “Section 1” işlerini gerçekleştirdik. Zaman geçtikçe birbirimizin projelerini üretim sırasında ve hatta öncesinde tartışmaya başladık. Bir süre sonra fikrin ya da çözümün kime ait olduğu gitgide bulanıklaşmaya başladı. 2007 yılında Frankfurt Basis’te gerçekleşen ilk büyük kişisel sergimiz “Be-cause”un kurumu ve bu sergi için ortaklaşa yaptığımız projeler sonrasında beraber çalışmamız devamlılık kazandı.

N.B.: “Bitmeyen Karalama” (Ceaseless Doodle) adlı çalışmanız geçtiğimiz yıl Tütün Deposu’ndaki “Fikirler Suça Dönüşünce” sergisinde gösterilmişti. Bu çalışmadan bahsedebilir misiniz biraz?

Ö.G.: “Bitmeyen Karalama”yı ilk defa 2009 yılında Kunsthalle Mannheim’da gerçekleşen “Hector Preis” sergisi sırasında duvara çizdik. Türkiye’de ise ilk defa “Fikirler Suça Dönüşünce” sergisinde gösterildi.

Bu çalışma için dünyadaki tüm ülkelerin sınır çizgileri A4 boyutunda kağıtlara tam sayfa olarak basıldı. Böylece Lüksemburg gibi alanı küçük ülkelerle Kanada ya da Çin gibi büyük ülkeler eşitlenmiş oldu. Tüm bu görüntüler şeffaf kağıtlara çizildi, taranarak bilgisayara geçirildi ve daha sonra duvara yansıtılarak üst üste çizildi. Bunun dışında işin başlığını ele alırsak, ülke sınırlarını karalama eylemiyle birleştirmek de bizim için önemliydi. Burada işin ismi birbirine tamamen zıt iki çizim şeklini bir araya getiriyor: Sınır çizmek ve karalama yapmak. Karalama sırasında kişi devamlı, amaçsız ve çizilen şeye konsantre olmadan bir çizim oluştururken, sınır çizimlerinde bu durum son derece hesaplı bir şekilde gerçekleşiyor.

N.B.: “Bitmeyen Karalama” bu seneki İstanbul Bienali’nde de sergilendi. Bu aslında bir üçlemenin parçası değil mi? “Bayrak-lar” (Flag-s), “Bitmeyen Karalama”, ve “Uğultu” (Hullabaloo).  Bu üçlemeyi ve bienale çağırılma sürecinizi anlatabilir misiniz?

Ö.G.: Bu üçleme dünyadaki tüm ulusal bayrakları (Bayrak-lar), dünyadaki tüm ulusal sınırları (Bitmeyen Karalama) ve dünyadaki tüm ulusal marşları (Uğultu) içinde barındırıyor.

“Bayrak-lar” işi icin tüm ulusal bayraklar ink-jet printer yardımıyla tek bir kâğıda üst üste basıldı. Sonuç: Siyah bir kare. “Bitmeyen Karalama’da tüm ülke sınırları üst üste çizildi ve ortaya görsel bir kakofoni çıktı. “Uğultu”da ise tüm ulusal marşlar üst üste bindirildi ve sonuçta rahatsız edici bir ses yaratıldı. Bu çalışmalarla ülkelerin bayraklarını, sınırlarını ve milli marşlarını bir arada sunarak anlamlarını kaybettiriyoruz.

N.B.: Kimlik ve sınırlar -özellikle de coğrafi ve kültürel açıdan- üzerinde çalıştığınız konular değil mi? Neden?

Ö.G.: Aslında biz kimlik ve sınırlar üzerine çalışmayı seçmedik. Bütün bu meseleler ve yarattıkları sorunlarla bir şekilde mücadele etmek zorunda kaldığımız için üretimlerimiz çoğunlukla bu konular üzerine oldu. Bir de hem Frankfurt’un hem de Städelschule’nin %35-40’ını yabancı nüfus oluşturuyor. Bu melez yapı bize farklı bakış açıları kazandırdı diyebiliriz. Bunun da dışında belki de en önemli neden başka bir ülkede yaşam mücadelesi vermek oldu. Yabancı olma durumu hem hayatla hem de sanatla olan ilişkimizi tamamen dönüştürdü.

N.B.: Kosova’da tam da bu sınır konusuna parmak basan işinizi sergilediniz ve altına özellikle herhangi bir bilgi ya da açıklama eklemediniz. Sınırından girmesi kolay ama çıkması zor bir ülke olması sizi nasıl etkiledi ve bu çalışmanın gelişimine ne yönde katkı sağladı? Bu çalışmadan bahsedebilir misiniz?

M.K.: “Scenes” projesini 2005 yılında “Academy Remix. Städelschule, Frankfurt meets Missing Identity, Pristine” projesi kapsamında gerçekleştirdik. Bu proje sayesinde 6 ay içerisinde 2 kere Pristine’de kalma şansımız da oldu. Aslında Kosova’ya gitmeden önce “Scenes” projesine genel hatlarıyla karar vermiştik. Çünkü çok yakın zamanda olan savaş ve Kosova’nın o zamanki belirsiz pozisyonu açısından bu projenin duygusal yoğunluğu bizim için çok yüksek. Mesela nefes alırken o aldığın nefesi veremediğin için boğulduğunu düşün. Bizim istediğimiz hem nefes alan hem de verebilen bir şey yapmaktı. Bu nedenle Kosova’nın her bir sınırına giderek sınırları herhangi bir evin duvarında asılı olabilecek klasik birer manzara fotoğrafı gibi fotoğrafladık. Fotoğraflar her seferinde Kosova’dan dışarıya doğru çekildi ve daha sonra 3*4,5 metre boyutlarında basılarak şehir merkezinde sergilendi. Kamusal alanda fotoğrafların içeriğiyle ilgili bir bilgi vermedik çünkü orada hiç kimsenin sınır problemini hatırlamaya ihtiyacı yoktu. Güzel birer manzara fotoğrafı olmaları yeterliydi.

N.B.: Çalışmalarınız çoğunlukla bir nevi milliyetçilik eleştirisi. Ama bunu sert ya da muhalif bir biçimde provoke ederek yapmıyorsunuz. Bu da seyirciyi daha iyi yakalamanızı sağlıyor ve onları çalışmalarınız ile birebir ilgilenmeye itiyor…

Ö.G.: Evet doğru. Kimseyi ya da hiçbir şeyi parmakla göstermiyoruz. Bunu yapmıyoruz çünkü bir şeyi direkt olarak göstermenin (çoğu zaman) karşısında durduğumuz şeyin kendisine benzeme riskini taşıdığını düşünüyoruz. Bunun yerine genellikle karşısında durduğumuz şeyin sadece kendisini kullanarak estetik çözümlemelerle anlamını manipülasyona uğratıyoruz, başka bir şeye dönüştürüyoruz. Yani tanımını ortadan kaldırıyoruz. Bu da bize o şey hakkında söylemek istediğimiz söz için bağımsız bir platform yaratıyor. Tabii bunu yaparken sanat tarihinin bilinen görsellerini ya da formlarını da kullanıyoruz. Bu da izleyiciye zaten tanıdığı bir görsele yaklaşma rahatlığını veriyor. Tabii işin öteki yüzü yani konsepti bu aşamadan sonra devreye giriyor.  Çünkü işe yaklaştıkça ya da onunla vakit geçirdikçe aslında o formal tanımın nasıl oluştuğu ya da aslında ne olduğu ortaya çıkmaya başlıyor.

N.B.: Sanatın, belirli bir alanında sınırlı kalmıyorsunuz. Enstelasyon da yapıyorsunuz video da. Bu neye bağlı ve sizi daha özgür kılıyor mu?

M.K.: Açıkçası bu durum bizim işlerimizde her proje için farklılık gösteriyor. Tercihleri bizden çok üzerinde çalıştığımız fikrin ihtiyaçları yönlendiriyor. Böyle olunca klasik monokrom bir resim, bir video, bir enstalasyon ya da performans ağırlıklı bir çalışma da yapabiliyoruz. Bunun yanında bir aktör, dansçı ya da bir özel dedektifle de ortak çalışabiliyoruz.

N.B.: Dedektif mi?

Ö.G.: Evet. New York Metro istasyonlarında yer alan “If you See Something, Say Something” yazılarına karşı “Suspicious Activities” (Süpheli Hareketler) başlığı altında yaptığımız Male Subject & Female Subject (Bahsi geçen Kadın & Bahsi geçen Erkek) çalışması için profesyonel bir özel dedektiflik bürosuyla çalıştık. Kısaca bahsetmek gerekirse: New York metrolarında sürekli olarak karşılaştığımız “If you See Something, Say Something” (Bir şey Görürsen, Bir şey Söyle) yazısı bize her bireyin etrafını gözetleme ve şüpheli gördüğü hareketleri ihbar etme sorumluluğu olduğunu söylüyor. Fakat eğer herkes etrafını gözetlerse, gözetimin merkezinde aslında gözetleyenin kendisi var demektir. Bu da dolaylı olarak her bireye kendi hareketlerini kontrol etmesi gerektiğini söyler ve hem kanun yoluyla hem de kamu tarafından gözetim altında olduğu mesajını iletir.

Bu bakış açısıyla yapmaya karar verdiğimiz proje için New York’ta beraber çalıştığımız kurum olan Residency Unlimited’den ICORP Dedektiflik Bürosuyla kontağa geçmelerini ve bizi 1 günlük bir süre için izletmelerini istedik. Burada dedektif bürosundan istenen en önemli şey gözetimin son derece detaylı bir şekilde yer ve zaman gösterilerek hem video hem de yazılı olarak belgelendirilmesiydi. Böylece; sıradan bir günümüz bir özel dedektif raporuna çevrildi ve bu rapor sıradan bir günü şüpheli bir duruma dönüştürdü.

N.B.: Contemporary İstanbul fuarına özel bir çalışma yaptınız. İki adet de daha önceden yaptığınız çalışma ile bir arada sergilendi bu iş. Yeni çalışmayı biraz anlatabilir misiniz? Ve diğer iki çalışmanın burada olma sebebi neydi?

Ö.G.: Her ne kadar fuar alanı olsa da bu Türkiye’de gerçekleştirdiğimiz ve seçimlerimizde tamamen özgür bırakıldığımız ilk kişisel sunum. Bu nedenle mekânı kurgularken kendimize burada “ne söylemek istiyoruz?” sorusunu sorduk. “On the Stage” (Sahnede) ve “Persuasion Exercises” (İkna Egzersizleri), işlerini sergilemeye böyle karar verdik. Her iki işi de kısaca açıklamak gerekirse: “On the Stage” (Sahnede) videosunu 2010 yılında İstanbul’da “Invisible Play” isimli 10 günlük bir workshop sırasında yaptık. Basında yer alan savaş ve eylem fotoğraflarından yola çıkılarak oluşturulan bu çalışma için zor durumda kalmış insanların vücut hareketlerini içeren 17 adet çizimi bir dansçıya verdik. Dansçıdan bu hareketleri birbirine bağlamasını ve bunu yaparken de her hareket için yaklaşık 5 saniye kadar pozisyonunu korumasını istedik. Ortaya çıkan sahneyle amaçlanan savaş ve gösterilerde zor durumda kalan insanların bir anlığına anıtsal bir platforma taşınmasıydı. “Persuasion Exercises” (İkna Egzersizleri), 2011 ise Mayıs ayında seçimlerden hemen önce kamusal alanda (Ankara, Yüksel Caddesi) gerçekleştirdiğimiz bir çalışma. Bu proje için bir aktörle beraber çalıştık. Aktöre, Haziran seçimleri için parti liderlerinin propaganda posterlerinde verdikleri pozları göstererek ondan bu pozları yeniden canlandırmasını istedik. Sonrasında her bir poz tekrar fotoğraflandı ve damga gibi grafiklere çevrilerek vücut egzersizlerini gösteren grafiklerde olduğu gibi numaralandırıldı. Bu iki işe karar verdikten sonra yeni yapacağımız proje bizim için netleşti.

M.K.: Fuar için yaptığımız yeni projemizin ismi “İlk günkü kadar taze”. Bu çalışma için T.C. Anayasası’nın içerisinde bulunan her bir harf, sayı ve noktalama işareti metin içerisindeki konumları değiştirilmeden birbirlerinden ayrıldı ve 53 kitaba çevrildi. Böylece anayasa, yazının temelini oluşturan elemanlara indirgenmiş oldu. “İlk günkü kadar taze”, ilk okulda okuma yazmayı öğrenirken harf, rakam ve noktalama işaretleriyle ilk defa tanıştığımız zamana referans vererek anayasayı hayali kurgulara açık bir platform haline dönüştürüyor.

Bu serginin kurgusu da bizim için önemli. Çünkü; bir tarafa politikacıları, bir tarafa eylemlerde zor durumda kalan insanları, ikisinin arasına da anayasayı yerleştiriyoruz. Bu şekilde anayasa çoğunlukla yasal ve yasadışıyı temsil eden görsellerin hemen ortasında duruyor.

Bütün bunların yanında aslında bu üç çalışmanın en önemli ortak noktası üçünün de dille ilgili olması.

N.B.: Gelecek programınız nasıl? Sırada ne gibi sergiler var?

Ö.G.: Yıl boyunca Frankfurt dışındaydık. 3 ay Dublin’de ve hemen sonrasında da 6 ay boyunca New York’ta kaldık. Daha sonrasında da vaktimizin çoğu Türkiye’de geçti. Uzun süredir yaşadığımız şehirden uzak kalmak doğrusu bize çok iyi geldi. Bu yüzden önümüzdeki yıl içerisinde de biraz dolaşmak ve kendimize Frankfurt’un dışında çalışma ortamları yaratmak istiyoruz. Bu şu anda sadece bir istek tabii. Bunun dışında 2012 yılı içerisinde bazı kişisel ve grup sergilerimiz olacak. Ama şu anda en yakındaki sergi Şubat ayında Londra’da Parasol Unit’te katılacağımız bir grup sergisi.

A Tribute to the Spire: A Hallelujah to
a Future Yet to Come – by Rana Öztürk

Özlem Günyol & Mustafa Kunt’s four-piece work UP! UP! UP! takes its inspiration from Dublin’s Spire, known also as the Monument of Light – the thin, 120-metre-long structure that has been standing on the city’s O’Connell Street since 2003. Claiming to be the tallest sculpture in the world, this needle-like monument is unavoidable in the middle of the city. The first encounter with it is often one of curiosity, wonder, suspicion, amazement and surprise due to its overwhelming height, highly futuristic look, and inappropriate appearance and position among the more intimate, shorter, city centre buildings. Most cities have a famous tall building, a tower, monument or a skyscraper that with time becomes a symbol for the city, a point of reference for its residents, a tourist attraction for visitors, a historical site or a place that offers the best possible views of the city. The Spire in Dublin, though, is a site of ambivalence, at least at first sight… Özlem Günyol & Mustafa Kunt, who visited Dublin as artists in residence at Temple Bar Gallery and Studios for three months, have made use of their first encounter with the Spire as the basis of the work they produced during their stay in Dublin.

UP! UP! UP! consists of four separate pieces. Two main elements of the work are two paintings, which together represent a one-to-one scale portrait of the Spire. User’s Manual, which documents a historical timeline of the monument and the song “Up Went Nelson”, is presented on the wall as reference material for the viewer. Lastly, the forth element of the work is a performance of a song based on the melody and structure of “Up Went Nelson” with new lyrics written by the artists for the Spire. While the paintings play on the idea of real life representation of the monument in a
gallery context using its formal qualities and size, the song represents the complex historical and political background of the monument and the symbolic significance of its site for Dublin.

Günyol & Kunt make use of the exact physical appearance and actual measurements of the Spire to translate it on to a pictorial plane. The Spire is a stainless steel conical structure that has a diameter of three metres on the ground that gradually narrows to 15 centimetres at the top. On the picture plane, it is represented as a rectangular painting of three metres in width, with all the height of the monument divided into several sections folded onto each other. The result is a monochrome abstract painting that actually depicts the whole Spire in two dimensions. The second painting, placed on the floor of the gallery space, is also very minimal in its form and complements the other one with its round shape and choice of colour. A circle in the size of the bottom part of the Spire, this painting acquires the quality of text-based works of Conceptual Art of the late 1960s and 1970s, with the words UP! UP! UP! written on it. These words somehow
enhance the sculptural quality of the piece on the floor and incite the viewer to visualise the monument rising up from the painting. This, in a sense, completes the first painting, rendering a three dimensional image of the Spire.

The work culminates in a singing performance of a song written by the artists for the Spire based on the tune of an earlier song “Up Went Nelson”. This time, the words UP! UP! UP! read almost like a call to step up to the painting and sing the song. The first viewing of the piece at Temple Bar Gallery and Studios indeed turned the painting into a stage where five singers sang the song standing on. In this way the bleak image of the monument got broken up with the addition of a human element to it. Along with the traces of the singers’ footsteps left on the painting, the recording of the performance is to be included in later presentations of the work. A mocking exaltation of the Spire, this singing represents a possible way of engaging with the Spire despite its distant, cold outlook, while also connecting it to a past that it seems not so willing to acknowledge.

The Spire, controversial in its dominating position over the city, stands in the place of another controversial monument, Nelson’s Pillar, which had been standing there from 1808 till it was blown up in 1966 by the IRA. This 40-metre-high granite pillar was put up in order to honour Horatio, Lord Nelson, an English navy hero, who was famous for his role in the Napoleonic Wars and his leadership at the Battle of Trafalgar, where he was shot dead in 1805. Soon after the erection of the pillar with a statue of Lord Nelson on its top there were debates about its removal due to many
reasons. It was seen as an obstruction to the traffic; there were concerns about whether it was aesthetically good enough; and as a symbol of the troublesome colonial history of Ireland, many nationalists did not find it appropriate for the city. There were suggestions to replace the statue with statues of other Irish historical figures, which never led to any actual decision. It was only in 1966, the 50th anniversary of the Easter Rising, that these debates came to an end with the bombing of the pillar by members of the old IRA.

After the blowing up of the pillar, Go Lucky Four, a group of school teachers from Belfast, wrote the song “Up Went Nelson” set to the tune of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”. The song was very popular and remained number one on the Irish music charts for eight consecutive weeks. It is also an example of how cultural forms migrate and take different meanings in different contexts. For instance, “The Battle Hymn of Republic” was a popular hymn that was written during the American Civil War, and is still very well-known as an American patriotic song. It was based on
the same tune as “John Brown’s Song”, a marching song about the abolitionist John Brown who gave his life to put an end to slavery. Both songs were based on an earlier tune called “Say, brother, will you meet us” that goes back to the American Christian camp meeting movement of the early to mid-1800s. Therefore, the song/tune represents multiple authors and different ideologies depending on the context and time it was used. Indeed, there have been many other versions of the song, most often composed for celebrations of different occasions, either in playful ways or in attempts at glorification.

In UP! UP! UP!, Günyol & Kunt trace the source of the song, presenting earlier songs in which the tune was used, as well as other songs written for the destruction of Nelson’s Pillar. Along with “Good Lord Nelson” by the Irish folk musician Tommy Makem and “Nelson’s Farewell” played by the band Dubliners, “Up Went Nelson” represents the mocking, witty humour of the Irish, an amusing way of engaging with an incident long awaited. With a similar gesture of appropriating an earlier tune, Günyol & Kunt make a new song that this time addresses the Spire with a humorous approach to its current state in the city. Built as part of the plans for the revival of O’Connell Street, which had been in decline since the 1970s, the Spire rises confidently above the city as a pretentious symbol of the economic boom the country experienced from the 1990s to 2000s. In the context of the recent collapse of the Irish economy, this tall shiny monument has inadvertently become an embodiment of this period of over-indulgence. Nelson’s Pillar remembers the past; the Spire aspires to the future. Nelson’s Pillar symbolizes the colonial power; the Spire symbolises the glory of the Celtic Tiger. Nelson’s Pillar is a memorial; the Spire is a contemporary urban landmark. Nelson’s Pillar offers a view of the city to its visitors; the Spire looks over the city all by itself. Nelson’s Pillar commemorates an imperial hero; the Spire celebrates itself. Nelson’s Pillar represents a troubled history; the Spire represents nothing, but itself…