Untitled (borders from 1804 to 2006), 2006

video installation
DVD-loop, 1’39’’

Özlem Günyol’s video consisting of continuously changing shapes and colors, shows the changing borderlines of Europe from 1804 to 2006.

Image 1, 2: installation view; Kunstverein München, photographs: Kunstverein München e.V.

Scenes, 2005

ink-jet print on vinyl 300×450 cm;
digital video 15’26’’, loop (without sound)

Kosovo’s borderlines (Kosovo-Albania, Kosovo-Serbia, Kosovo-Macedonia, Kosovo- Montenegro) are visited and photographed by the artists as landscape photographs. Each photograph includes both countries.

Street view; city center Prishtina
photos: Günyol & Kunt

Foreignness, 2005

6 postcards, 10×15 cm

In 2005, we were in Kosovo for the first time. One of the two projects we realized there was photographing Prishtina with the “tourist eye”. A selection of these photos was then used for six different postcards sold in the stores of Prishtina.

photo: Gunyol & Kunt

On the Grapevine, 2005

video installation
7 monitors, 7 DVD players, 7 headphones, 7 digital videos, looped; painted wood

“Learning a language is related not only to the understanding of a sentence structure and the meaning of the words, but also to the organization of letters. Furthermore, it is also characteristic of any language that the person calling forth the words with a certain sound and rhythm designates the usage of that language. Even a person learning a new language still approaches the foreign language with his/her own linguistic melody and rhythm and this phenomenon sometimes causes misunderstanding.”

Özlem Günyol’s video installation On the Grapevine consist of the simultaneous translation of the text upon, from Turkish to German and from German to Turkish several times by seven different translators. Each translator translates the translation of the one before him/her. In this way, the text changes by using the gaps between these two languages and the perception of the translators.

Installation view; Basis, Frankfurt
photograph: Cem Yücetaş

Section 1, 2005

video, 4’44’’

The video captures the re-enactment of a short scene from the movie İtiraf (2002) by Turkish director Zeki Demirkubuz, which tells the story of a man suspecting his wife of being unfaithful. The artists themselves re-enact that scene. While their dialogue sticks with the actual dialogue in the original scene, the setting is transformed from the semipublic environment of a restaurant to the private setting of a kitchen, but glimpsed at through a door ajar. 

Untitled (Dial M for Murder), 2005

Painting on wall, 27 pieces, each; 70 × 100 cm
Artist Book; 27 pages, 20,1 × 15,8 × 0,4 cm

In the conception of his works, Mustafa Kunt also calls pictures into question, focusing on everyday habits of perception, often working with the appropriation or distortion of mass-media depictions.
The point of departure for his works “Untitled (Dial M for Murder)” (2005), and “Untitled” (2004) are feature films, namely, movies directed by Alfred Hitchcock – icons of West European filmic art
which Mustafa Kunt circumscribes. The artist makes himself the
protagonist by weaving his person and autobiographical elements of his life into the plot of the original. In doing so, he transforms film
history into his own history, writes himself, as it were, into European cultural history and claims a place in it. At the same time, these works allude to the idea that the construction of fantasy worlds, dreaming, and playing with fiction and reality are a significant part of identity
formation.

Barbara Heinrich, Turkish Delight, Exhibition Catalogue, 2007

1st photo on the right: Installation view, Städelschule Rundgang, 2005

Below: Installation view; Städtische Galerie Nordhorn
photo: Helmut Claus, Köln

grapefruit (YOKO ONO), 2005

ink-jet print on paper
framed dimensions; 40×40 cm

During Yoko Ono’s exhibition “Dream Universe” at Portikus in 2005, a group of students from the Städelschule was invited to implement the instructions from Yoko Ono’s book “grapefruit”.

Instead of choosing one of Yoko Ono’s instructions from the book, Mustafa Kunt gave his own instructions to create his artwork:

Instruction 1: Scan all the pages of Yoko Ono’s “grapefruit” book.
Instruction 2: Print them one by one on the same paper.

The printing process turned the book into a black square.

Floor, 2005
plastic floor covering element

…Özlem Günyol’s installation entitled Floor aims at creating a small-scale walking barrier of frequent metal bars placed on the grey marble floor of the Borusan Art Gallery. The work consists of plastic elements, which generally are used for fixing together floor covering materials like wood or laminate. The plastic elements are placed on the gallery’s floor at certain intervals. To be able to feel the most significant characteristic of the work, viewers have to walk some distance. These few steps in a short distance are so effective that they can make the viewers fall down.

[…]While referring to the decorative characteristics of the gallery’s floor, the frequently placed plastic elements that cover the metal bars also create an influence on how visitors view the other works shown in the exhibition space. While structuring the choreography of the viewer’s steps, Günyol uses the minimalist form language: although she repeats the elements at frequent intervals, she does not fill up the entrance level of the gallery but gives a sense of her work’s limits at the first sight. Thus, the artist introduces to the viewers, the differences between the “before” and “her own interpretation”, “simultaneously”. At this point, one should recall the viewers who stumble over the elements and trying not to fall down, turn their eyes to the floor, and get an impression of “What is that?” on their faces.

Necmi Sönmez, Stimmen, Nachtdurchwachsen, Stränge
Exhibition Catalogue (Borusan Culture and Art Center, Istanbul, 2005)

Installation view; Borusan Art Gallery, Istanbul
photos 1,2: Günyol & Kunt
photos 3,4,5: Ali Konyalı

Untitled, 2004

installation
scheme of adhesive letters dimensions variable

“Learning a language is related not only to the understanding of a sentence structure and the meaning of the words, but also to the organization of letters. Furthermore, it is also characteristic of any language that the person calling the words with a certain sound and rhythm designates the usage of that language. Even a person learning a new language still approaches the foreign language with his/her own linguistic melody and rhythm and this phenomenon sometimes causes misunderstanding.”

Özlem Günyol’s work Untitled intends to show a different type of language in writing, which is made with pronunciations of the English words in the Turkish language, by using the explanations about the pronunciations of the words in English-Turkish dictionary. In this way, this created writing includes and excludes both languages at the same time. It is also aimed at designating the gap between the visual perception of language and practice of speaking, which depends on the way the person pronounces and attributes certain characteristics to the words belonging to his/her past.

Installation view; Städtische Galerie Nordhorn
photograph: Helmut Claus