1 day to 5

Curated by Gülsen Bal & Walter Seidl

With Nevin Alada?, Halil Altindere, Ergin Çavu?o?lu, Gülsün Karamustafa, ?ener Özmen

Venue: freiraum Q21 / MuseumsQuartier Wien

The works in this screening 1 day to 5 investigate a variety of positions and possibilities addressing the challenges of life and the way in which one addresses ?memory of the city? towards transient spaces created while representing different aspect of Turkey at a slippery ground. However this project 1 day to 5 does not present works that is produced either on the past and its records or nostalgia, yet it includes its stillness, its sense of silence and darkness, where everything dies a little, where something has been left to sleep somewhere inside of us to be waken.

Nevin Alada? presents autonomous urban subjects in her video Raise the Roof which refering to the performance of the same name features four women dancing on top of an industrial building in Berlin to music heard only on their headphones while their stiletto heels punch holes in the roofing. Moving high above the city on a summer day, they look slightly out of place where the city below them seemingly takes no notice of their existence.

In the instance of Halil Altindere’ video work Wonderland (Courtesy of the artist and Pilot Gallery, Istanbul), “documents of the anger, resistance and hope voiced by the children of Sulukule, a neighbourhood of Istanbul which for six centuries hosted the Roma population of the city and their culture, demolished as a result of a decision made in 2006 as part of an urban transformation project. The work which features the artist using a new cinematic language that oscillates between a video clip and video-art for the first time, displays how one subculture (hip-hop) can flourish and live within another subculture (Roma). As the prosperity promised by the TOK? homes built in place of their neighbourhood demolished by the municipality ends up serving nothing more than social inequality, poverty and infrastructural problems, the deep-rooted life-style shaped with music and dance of the people of Sulukule faces oppression and irreversible corrosion. Istanbul?s adventure of concretization, gentrification and ?hygienisation?, is voiced by the group Tahribad-? ?syan and accompanied by Alt?ndere?s visuals which land like a punch in our stomach, producing a dreamlike reality that is difficult to digest, and to forget” as Dino Dinçer ?irin states.

Ergin Çavu?o?lu is known for his lyrical and unsettling video installations that reconstitute our sense of space, and pose questions about our understanding of place and identity in a globalised society marked by mobility. His single channel video Empire (after Andy Warhol - Courtesy of the artist and Rampa Gallery, Istanbul) reframes an ordinary building in reference to the representation of an iconised structure, while shifting from the global to the local.

Çavu?o?lu?s video captures in a static shot the transition from day to night surrounding a residential apartment block, thus reframing the extant strangeness of a minaret rising through the roof of the apartment in Karabük (Turkey), remain occupied and the main part of the mosque with the prayer room for worshipping is situated in the basement of the apartment. Borrowing his title from Andy Warhol’s film ?Empire?, which consists of a single shot of the Empire State Building and runs 8 hours and 6 minutes and chronicles the passage from day to night, Çavusoglu?s video rather echoes the ‘space of current relations’, associated with notions of temporal and spatial continuity in which the concepts of domestic comfort are unsettled through an unrelenting gaze, this is where we witness something different, ?another truth.?

Gülsün Karamustafa tackles the severe winter of 1954 when Bosphorus was filled with blocks of ice floating from the Black Sea Region in her video Bosphorus 1954 (Courtesy of the artist and Rampa Gallery, Istanbul). The event is still remembered as an ?Urban Legend?. This unexpected situation enabled the citizens of Istanbul to walk on foot over the sea in a miraculous way from one side to the other, stepping on ice blocks. Karamustafa tries to make up a recollection piece following the traces, through images and narrations, for those enchanting moments.

The irony employed in ?ener Özmen’s various works operates along multiple layers of the centre-periphery dichotomy, raising questions about power asymmetries on the global, within the Turkish society. Our Village (Courtesy of the artist and Pilot Gallery, Istanbul) is one of the exceptional works of Özmen in which the political edge is presented without any recourse to a humorous mediation which might have accompany the grimness of the existing conditions and herald possibilities of unraveling these asymmetries and produce occasions of flight. This presents alternatively a cross-referencing connection where the idyllic character of the Kurdish folk song chanted by two little girls is disrupted when bruises appear on their faces with each looping of the song. The girls sing on top of previously recorded material, which hints at the fact that the selection of these particular lyrics has a dictated massage, alluding to the methods of the authoritarian model of imposed modernism, inspecting and limiting the cultural activities, aggravating the economic and social poverty and designates hierarchies.

To summarise, this Status artistic survey: Film and Video screening: 1 day to 5 presents a variety of artistic stances, showing how present day individuals have to ‘own’ an anthology of changing ideas to the interpreting contemporarteniuos of the present, especially in terms of notion with ?menifestation? in their subject positions and positionalities in a seemingly globalised world at the midst of transient spaces.

The Open Systems programme is supported by:

MA 7 - Kultur Bildende Kunst

In kind support by:

Istanbul Bilgi University
P?LOT Gallery
Rampa Gallery