HOW LATITUDES BECOME FORMS : Esra Ersen

Hamam, Installation at Standartroom, Randers Kunstmuseum, Denmark, 2001, 2001
Esra Ersen
Courtesy the artist, Istanbul, Turkey

Esra Ersen

Esra Ersen b.1970 (Turkey)
lives and works in Istanbul, Turkey

launch interview with Ersen

Esra Ersen explores social behavior--the way identities are shaped and transformed across national, cultural, linguistic, and intimate borders. Whether working in photography, video, or installation, she often reacts to or uses the specific location of her activity in order to formalize her investigations. In a programmatic way, Ersen is analyzing how society administrates the different layers, tensions, and contradictions of its own construct. With serene subversion, her work is based on an empirical and analytical study of social situations through culture, myths, ritual, and economy. She applies a methodology of microevents borrowed from documentary film-making or from anthropological investigation.

In If You Could Speak Swedish (2001), the artist collaborated with a class of new immigrants studying Swedish in a school outside of Stockholm. She asked the students to write down, in their native language, what they would like to express if they could speak Swedish. The answers ranged from very personal, emotional expressions to political statements. The responses were translated into Swedish and the students were asked to read them in front of a camera. The participants' varying degrees of difficulty with the spoken words are visualized through body language. Ersen challenges the notion of a dominant language by showing the capacity of immigrants to master it. And she raises the issue of the subaltern voice when she asks immigrants--refugees of Chinese, Arabic, Russian, Spanish, and Bengali descent--to express their feelings in their "host" language. Shown at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, this work was also on display in a legendary Kebab restaurant in the city. Through these two presentations, Ersen provided two different "readings" of the same images, based on the distinct and opposing contexts: a major Western art institution that establishes cultural orthodoxy and canons and the vernacular milieu of an ethnic restaurant.

In her search for an alternative to the official voice, Ersen also explores the value of small talk. She examines the in-between quality of such conversations, which stand somewhere between the intimate and the pedestrian, the public and the private. In her video installation Hamam (2001), she conceived and provided a viewing room that made available to the audience a traditionally gender-exclusive space in which two women are partaking in endless, careless chitchat about everything and nothing. What begins as a casual conversation piece ends up being a critical consideration of the social space created by interpersonal communication. It is a space where, in this case, a private moment is bouncing into the display of public selves, where intimacy is broken and exposed to the audience's indiscreet and inquisitive gaze.

Ersen's work has appeared in numerous group exhibitions, including Manifesta 4, Frankfurt, Germany (2002); the Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2002); Turkish Contemporary Art, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany (2002); Becoming a Place, Proje4L Istanbul Museum of Contemporary Art, Turkey (2001); and Dare to Be Different, Cultural Center Linda Art, Fier, Albania (2001). The Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden, organized a solo exhibition of her work in 2002.

--Philippe Vergne

Esra Ersen

launch interview with Ersen

Esra Ersen explores social behavior--the way identities are shaped and transformed across national, cultural, linguistic, and intimate borders. Whether working in photography, video, or installation, she often reacts to or uses the specific location of her activity in order to formalize her investigations. In a programmatic way, Ersen is analyzing how society administrates the different layers, tensions, and contradictions of its own construct. With serene subversion, her work is based on an empirical and analytical study of social situations through culture, myths, ritual, and economy. She applies a methodology of microevents borrowed from documentary film-making or from anthropological investigation.

In If You Could Speak Swedish (2001), the artist collaborated with a class of new immigrants studying Swedish in a school outside of Stockholm. She asked the students to write down, in their native language, what they would like to express if they could speak Swedish. The answers ranged from very personal, emotional expressions to political statements. The responses were translated into Swedish and the students were asked to read them in front of a camera. The participants' varying degrees of difficulty with the spoken words are visualized through body language. Ersen challenges the notion of a dominant language by showing the capacity of immigrants to master it. And she raises the issue of the subaltern voice when she asks immigrants--refugees of Chinese, Arabic, Russian, Spanish, and Bengali descent--to express their feelings in their "host" language. Shown at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, this work was also on display in a legendary Kebab restaurant in the city. Through these two presentations, Ersen provided two different "readings" of the same images, based on the distinct and opposing contexts: a major Western art institution that establishes cultural orthodoxy and canons and the vernacular milieu of an ethnic restaurant.

In her search for an alternative to the official voice, Ersen also explores the value of small talk. She examines the in-between quality of such conversations, which stand somewhere between the intimate and the pedestrian, the public and the private. In her video installation Hamam (2001), she conceived and provided a viewing room that made available to the audience a traditionally gender-exclusive space in which two women are partaking in endless, careless chitchat about everything and nothing. What begins as a casual conversation piece ends up being a critical consideration of the social space created by interpersonal communication. It is a space where, in this case, a private moment is bouncing into the display of public selves, where intimacy is broken and exposed to the audience's indiscreet and inquisitive gaze.

Ersen's work has appeared in numerous group exhibitions, including Manifesta 4, Frankfurt, Germany (2002); the Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2002); Turkish Contemporary Art, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany (2002); Becoming a Place, Proje4L Istanbul Museum of Contemporary Art, Turkey (2001); and Dare to Be Different, Cultural Center Linda Art, Fier, Albania (2001). The Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden, organized a solo exhibition of her work in 2002.

--Philippe Vergne

Can Altay

launch interview with Can Altay

An architect, artist, designer, and scholar, Can Altay is interested in unorthodox appropriations of the built environment. Influenced by Georges Bataille's ideas on transgression, Michel Foucault's ideas on power and non-nor-mativity, and Henri Lefebvre's conceptions of social space as well as by art history, Altay approaches his subject matter from a number of discursive directions. His current project, the minibar projections, is an exploration, documentation, and exhibition of the transgressive use of semipublic spaces by young people. Minibars, named by the youth who create and use them, are impromptu gathering places around and in-between buildings in Ankara, the capital city of Turkey. Architectural and geographic "one night stands," they are, in the words of the artist, "a utilisation of physical environment for an event [outside of the intent of] the builders, designers, and residents." These locations become places through occupation, use, and social relations, much as Lefebvre proposed in The Production of Space. Altay's project documents these appropriations in the form of an audiovisual installation--slides, taken at the minibars, are projected in the gallery, along with sound recordings from the events. Viewers are immersed in the experience of the minibars and the space, sometimes casting shadows as they walk through the projected light.

Altay's documentation of informal participants' occupation of the semipublic realm and the resulting architectural and social response (heightened fences, the erection of metal bars) alerts us to the increasing privatization of our surroundings and the almost complete lack of truly public space in the urban sphere. Additionally, his work captures fleeting moments in time, a sense reinforced by the age of the young minibar occupants, who are poised at the edge of adulthood.

Altay was featured in Eve Hediyesi, Oda Projesi, Istanbul, Turkey (2002); Becoming a Place, Proje4L Istanbul Museum of Contemporary Art (2001); and an exhibition at the Çankaya Center for Contemporary Arts in Ankara (2000).

--Aimee Chang

The Local Tango and the Global Dance
Vasif Kortun, Cuauhtémoc Medina

does not ultimately need one periphery, and the periphery never really wants to do away with the dualistic system that it inherits and sustains. Who knows if one is not in fact the center of the periphery? So, in a way, I try to operate outside the local/global, center/periphery system; they are orbital constellations interdependent on each other. There are, of course, tactical handicaps in working simultaneously within both realms--it is one thing to approach these systems as merely operational, but shall we go on?

Warmest, Vasif

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Dear Vasif,

Yes, I think we should go on. First, because it seems to me that there is still something to gain from upholding the operation of the periphery/center dichotomy, namely, preventing a regression into new twisted forms of nationalism and covert nationalist cultural policies. Just recently, an elderly Mexican art critic, Raquel Tibol, proclaimed that Mexico is not a periphery, that "we are both our center and our periphery." This in my view entails an attempt to reconstitute the cozy feeling of a local artistic wholeness, where local artists can be as indulgent as they want with their sense of belonging, local institutions can still pretend to create a local canon and then try to export it without any questioning, and finally local critics (like me) can benefit from an easily achieved local authority. As a friend of mine told me many years ago, in places such as mine there is always the risk of becoming the little king of a little kingdom. Despite the constant violence involved in the arbitrariness of global selection and the constitution of the transnational artistic canon, I feel that the very randomness of this machinery is more exciting and more intellectually effective than the reconstitution of the idea of "international art" as something akin to a United Nations assembly of small national schools.

I would even go so far as to propose that it is only through the current interlocking and, yes, as you put it, the complicity of the periphery and the center that we in the periphery can pretend to search for a sense of radicalism in cultural practice. Very cynically, if you want, I would say that it is due to the center's longing for some kind of political specificity in the art coming from "out there" that we see artists emerging around us who do not conform to the expectations of the market or to local institutional tastes in terms of "quality," "formal discipline," and "seriousness." In fact, political and intellectual radicalism in the periphery emerges and has a chance of becoming artistically relevant because of what I would describe as "foreign intervention"--the displaced utopian and critical desires that the critics and curators in the centers cannot necessarily find in their immediate surroundings.

To a certain extent, this may apply to your own situation. How do you explain the apparent contradiction of Proje4L departing from yet depending on the specific dynamics and resources available in Turkey? In other words, can our local practices survive their inherent unpopularity without the certain stamp of authority that comes from our thin participation in the global sphere? To be more specific, what exactly do you show in your museum? Is it a professional and well-funded venture like Kiasma? Is it concerned with representing accurately what is going on around you in your place?

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Dear Cuauhtémoc,

It is precisely the luxury of the periphery that needs a historical dismantling. Otherwise, the contemporary cannot be wholly emancipated. I think it was Luis Camnitzer who articulated in the Hybrid State catalogue the "local kingdom" with its middle- and bureaucratic class base.[3] The class base of the peripheral power can therefore be linked to the project of modernity (other modernisms, if you will) as the privileged subject and agent.

3 See Luis Camnitzer, "After the Fall of Bureau Communism," in Hybrid State, exh. cat. (New York: Exit Art, 1992).

Esra Ersen