My 5th solo exhibition Anamnesis, which opened on the night of 15 November at Karşı Sanat Çalışmaları, Istanbul, will continue until 15 December 2023.

My large-scale paintings form the backbone of the exhibition, in which I carry the concept of “anamnesis” in its title with the meanings of remembering something, reviving retrospective memory, recalling past experiences and information.

The acrylic paintings on canvas draw their inspiration from ancient images of millennia-old civilisations that have been transformed, tamed or gender-swapped, from the air war massacres of 80 years ago that destroyed cities with their civilian inhabitants, from the collective dreams of indigenous peoples of the Americas, and from mythological stories, some of the content of which is debatable. The exhibition also includes videos in which the participating professional actors and actresses respond to a question posed by the artist on the screens, facing the audience. My performance video also meets the audience under the title “Not enough power”.

Images from the opening night

Paintings:

Cuniculus taurus

Acrylic on canvas, 188 x 90 cm, 2023, Stockholm

The text accompanying the exhibition:

“…An example of Sanskrit jana undergoing a sound change during substitution is the Avestan zana. As Arthur F. J. Remy explained in a short article in volume 20 of the Journal of the American Oriental Society in 1899, the Sanskrit root jan appears as srvo-zanem in the 19th yasht of the hymns to the Zoroastrian gods, the oldest record of the Avesta language. Here srvo is Latin for cornus, the horn, and zanem for race. What is meant by srvo-zanem in the hymn is belonging to the horned race, which refers to the deities depicted as horned in the temples. What concerns us here is the relation of zanem to zana, the Sanskrit jana. As mentioned above, jana also includes race in the sense of a separate community. Moreover, in Old Persian inscriptions we find expressions such as paru-zana, meaning “composed of various races”…

…Zenan, with the Persian plural suffix -an added to the word zen, means women. The word zen is derived from the Sanskrit jana, meaning zana, which has passed into Persian pronunciation through the Avesta. In street language, we encounter the word zen unexpectedly in the word zampara. Zampara is born from the word zen-bare (woman-friendly)…”

(Samet Yalçın, Sabah Ülkesi [Morning Land], Culture, arts and philosophy magazine, issue 62, January 2020)

Our path, our trace, our loss….

Acrylic on canvas, 194 x 104 cm, 2023, Stockholm

“Europae, Descriptio”

Acrylic on canvas and original17th century copper engraved Homann map, 188 x 120 cm, 2018, Stockholm

WOMAN as an abyss, where Psyche cannot meet

Acrylic on canvas, 183 x 109 cm, 2023, Stockholm

Every night…

Acrylic on canvas, 185 x 122 cm, 2023, Stockholm

As the group of dead marched from Frongastell to Pyrsau…

 Acrylic on canvas, 188 x 111 cm, 2023, Stockholm

The text accompanying the exhibition:

”…Unlike Elias, who always connected illness and death with tribulations, just punishment, and guilt, Evan told tales of the dead who had been struck down by fate untimely, who knew they had been cheated of what was due to them and tried to return to life. If you had an eye for them they were to be seen quite often, said Evan. At first glance they seemed to be normal people, but when you looked more closely their faces would blur or flicker slightly at the edges. And they were usually a little shorter than they had been in life, for the experience of death, said Evan, diminishes us, just as a piece of linen shrinks when you first wash it. The dead almost always walked alone, but they did sometimes go around in small troops; they had been seen wearing brightly colored uniforms or wrapped in gray cloaks, marching up the hill above the town to the soft beat of a drum, and only a little taller than the walls round the fields through which they went. Evan told me the story of how his grandfather once had to step aside on the road from Frongastell to Pyrsau to let one of these ghostly processions pass by when it caught up with him. It had consisted entirely of beings of dwarfish stature who strode on at a fast pace, leaning forward slightly and talking to each other in reedy voices. Hanging from a hook on the wall above Evan’s low workbench, said Austerlitz, was the black veil that his grandfather had taken from the bier when the small figures muffled in their cloaks carried it past him, and it was certainly Evan, said Austerlitz, who once told me that nothing but a piece of silk like that separates us from the next world…

(W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz, translated by Anthea Bell, Modern Library, New York, 10th anniversary ed.)

Wovoka’s -realised- dream

Acrylic on canvas, 110 x 185 cm, 2023, Stockholm

The text accompanying the exhibition:

“Wovoka (ca. 1856 – 20 September 1932), spiritual leader of the Northern Paiute, had a dream during the solar eclipse of 1 January 1889. In his dream, he was taken up into the sky with all the other Native Americans who had survived all the massacres, transported to the spirit world, the earth split open, swallowed all the whites, and closed again to return to its natural state. The Native Americans in the sky were then returned to the earth to live in peace with their ancestors and all other living beings. Wovoka also said that it was shown to him that this dream would only become a reality for all Native American peoples if they constantly performed the ghost dance and enjoyed the new world.

At the time, tribes whose traditional nomadic lifestyles were restricted were forced to live on reservations administered by the federal government. The hope of Wovoka’s vision led representatives of western tribes to visit him and learn about his visions and, in particular, about this dance ritual. 

By 1890, the Ghost Dance had become widespread, especially among western tribes, often living on reservations. The collective dances began to become well-attended rituals, often lasting until the morning of the fifth day, and the clothes worn during these rituals were believed to be bulletproof.

As the ghost dance spread among the Sioux under Sitting Bull’s leadership, it began to cause fear among white settlers on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, and rumours spread that the Lakota Sioux had found a message in Wovoka’s visions that was very dangerous for them. His talk of a new era without whites came to be seen as a call to eliminate white settlers from the area.

This fear was taken up by newspapers at a time when publishers such as Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst were seeking sensational news. By November 1890, a number of newspaper headlines in America were already describing the dance as the largest act of rebellion against white settlers and US army troops.

A long article in the New York Times, entitled “How the Indians Are Preparing Themselves for War”, described how a reporter walked overland to a Sioux camp “accompanied by friendly Indian guides”. “The journey was extremely dangerous because of the frenzy of the enemy.” The article describes the dance the reporter claimed to have observed from a hill overlooking the camp. The dance took place in a large circle around a tree and was attended by 182 men and women:

The dancers held each other’s hands and moved slowly around the tree. Their feet did not rise as in the dance of the sun, often their tattered moccasins seemed never to leave the ground, and their knees bent tiredly. “I see my father, I see my mother, I see my brother, I see my sister,” as translated by friendly Indian guides in their incessant and monotonous chanting, with their eyes closed and their heads bowed to the ground.

In the late 19th century, most Americans were familiar with the name of Sitting Bull, the Hunkpapa Sioux medicine man. Although Sitting Bull was not directly involved in the so-called Custer massacre of 1876, he was nearby and his followers attacked Custer and his men.

After Custer’s death, Sitting Bull led his people to safety in Canada. He then accepted an offer of amnesty and returned to the United States in 1881. In the mid-80s he toured with “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show” with artists such as Annie Oakley.

Returning to South Dakota in 1890, Sitting Bull sympathised with the Ghost Dance movement and urged young people to participate in the rituals.

Federal authorities decided to arrest Sitting Bull for his support of the movement, believing that he was becoming the leader of a possible major rebellion.

On 15 December 1890, a detachment of the US Army, accompanied by “friendly” Indians working as police officers on the reservation, went to where Sitting Bull, his family and some of his supporters were camped. 

Sitting Bull cooperated and agreed to go with the reservation police, but the youths with him attacked the police. In the ensuing shootout, Sitting Bull was shot and killed.

The New York Times reported the news of Sitting Bull’s death on its front page, describing him as “an old wizard” and “a cunning old schemer”.

The Ghost Dance movement came to a bloody end at the Wounded Knee massacre on the morning of 29 December 1890. A detachment of the 7th Cavalry attacked an Indian camp led by a chief named Big Foot, and within an hour nearly 300 Indian men, women and children were killed.

The New York Times reported the news of Sitting Bull’s death on its front page, describing him as “an old wizard” and “a cunning old schemer”.

The Ghost Dance movement came to a bloody end at the Wounded Knee massacre on the morning of 29 December 1890. A detachment of the 7th Cavalry attacked an Indian camp led by a chief named Big Foot, and within an hour nearly 300 Indian men, women and children were killed. 

After the Wounded Knee massacre, the Ghost Dance movement was largely broken. Although some scattered resistance to white rule emerged in the following years, the conflict between Indians and whites in the West was over.”

Hamburg’s powerless angels (27 July 1943, Gomorrah Massacre)

Acrylic on canvas, 187 x 100 cm, 2023, Stockholm

The text accompanying the exhibition:

”…In the summer of 1943, during a long heat wave, the RAF, supported by the U.S. Eighth Army Air Force, flew a se­ries of raids on Hamburg. The aim of Operation Gomor­rah, as it was called, was to destroy the city and reduce it as completely as possible to ashes. In a raid early in the morning of July 27, beginning at one A. M., ten thousand tons of high-explosive and incendiary bombs were dropped on the densely populated residential area east of the Elbe, comprising the districts of Hammerbrook, Hamm-Nord and Hamm-Süd, Billwerder Ausschlag and parts of St. Georg, Eilbek, Barmbek, and Wandsbek. A now famil­iar sequence of events occurred: first all the doors and windows were torn from their frames and smashed by high-explosive bombs weighing four thousand pounds, then the attic floors of the buildings were ignited by lightweight incendiary mixtures, and at the same time firebombs weighing up to fifteen kilograms fell into the lower stories. Within a few minutes, huge fires were burn­ing all over the target area, which covered some twenty square kilometers, and they merged so rapidly that only a quarter of an hour after the first bombs had dropped the whole airspace was a sea of flames as far as the eye could see. Another five minutes later, at one-twenty A. M., a firestorm of an intensity that no one would ever before have thought possible arose. The fire, now rising two thousand meters into the sky, snatched oxygen to itself so violently that the air currents reached hurricane force, resonating like mighty organs with all their stops pulled out at once. The fire burned like this for three hours. At its height, the storm lifted gables and roofs from buildings, flung rafters and entire advertising billboards through the air, tore trees from the ground, and drove human beings before it like living torches. Behind collapsing façades, the flames shot up as high as houses, rolled like a tidal wave through the streets at a speed of over a hundred and fifty kilometers an hour, spun across open squares in strange rhythms like rolling cylinders of fire. The water in some of the canals was ablaze. The glass in the tram car windows melted; stocks of sugar boiled in the bakery cellars. Those who had fled from their air-raid shelters sank, with gro­tesque contortions, in the thick bubbles thrown up by the melting asphalt. No one knows for certain how many lost their lives that night, or how many went mad before they died. When day broke, the summer dawn could not pene­trate the leaden gloom above the city. The smoke had risen to a height of eight thousand meters, where it spread like a vast, anvil-shaped cumulonimbus cloud. A wavering heat, which the bomber pilots said they had felt through the sides of their planes, continued to rise from the smoking, glowing mounds of stone. Residential districts so large that their total street length amounted to two hundred  kilometers were utterly destroyed. Horribly disfigured corpses lay everywhere. Bluish little phosphorous flames still flickered around many of them; others had been roasted brown or purple and reduced to a third of their normal size. They lay doubled up in pools of their own melted fat, which had sometimes already congealed. The central death zone was declared off-limits in the next few days. When punishment labor gangs and camp inmates could begin clearing it in August, after the rubble had cooled down, they found people still sitting at tables or up against walls where they had been overcome by monoxide gas. Elsewhere, clumps of flesh and bone or whole heaps of bodies had cooked in the water gushing from bursting boilers. Other victims had been so badly charred and re­duced to ashes by the heat, which had risen to a thousand degrees or more, that the remains of families consisting of several people could be carried away in a single laundry basket…”

(W. G. Sebald, Air War and Literature, p. 26-28, Random House, New York, 2003)

Video performance:

Not enough power

Video performance, 07.40 minutes, 2023, Stockholm

Videos:

Being able to shed tears when necessary: Selen

Scheduled zoom recording, 06.32 min., 2023, Stockholm

Being able to shed tears when necessary: Yaşar

Scheduled zoom recording, 19.11 min., 2023, Stockholm

Being able to shed tears when necessary: Nazan

Scheduled zoom recording, 15.33 min., 2023, Stockholm

Being able to shed tears when necessary: Mahir

cheduled zoom recording, 13.29 min., 2023, Stockholm

Being able to shed tears when necessary: Taner

Scheduled zoom recording, 13.45 min., 2023, Stockholm

Being able to shed tears when necessary: Tilbe

Scheduled zoom recording, 13.42 dk. / min., 2023, İstanbul

Being able to shed tears when necessary: Laçin

Scheduled zoom recording, 20.38 min., 2023, İstanbul