The Sixth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

94 Emre Hüner Panoptikon The disjointed narrative of Emre Hüner’s Panoptikon 2005 is inspired by the visual structure of the falname , an Ottoman literary genre which first appeared in thirteenth-century Turkey. Falname were specially produced and illustrated publications based on the sacred text of Islam, the Qur’an, and were used for divinations and soothsaying by opening the book at any page and ascribing meaning to what lay open. Like an encounter with a random page, Panoptikon ’s jewel-like video animations are constructed from a personal archive of images that Hüner has built from disparate sources. With its representations of humans, animals and plants juxtaposed with tools, weaponry and machines, and set in amalgams of scenes resembling Turkish miniatures bridging the ancient and modern, the work allows us to observe hidden, forgotten and imagined histories. Hüner’s title alludes to the eighteenth-century panopticon, or ‘all-seeing’ prison structure, designed by the social reformer Jeremy Bentham, and later made infamous by philosopher Michel Foucault, who saw this architectural model as a metaphor for broader ‘mechanisms of power’. 1 Bentham’s intention was to provide visual access to all prison cells from a central observation tower. The possibility that the inmates might be watched at any time, without knowing when, was meant to encourage self-policing, a principle that Foucault argued could apply to any disciplinary system, such as hospitals, factories and schools. To inhabit this metaphor, the verticality of our bodies might be viewed as the central observation tower of Bentham’s prison. Our perceptions make us, at least to a certain extent, the centre of our own universe. In Foucault’s writing on the panopticon, the individual prison cells all facing the surveillance tower were ‘like so many cages, so many theatres, in which the actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible’. 2 In Hüner’s Panoptikon , the video animation also becomes a window into an otherworldly realm, which we can observe without being seen. By extension, we are invited to consider our world as characterised by systems of surveillance and discipline. Panoptikon ’s sequences are like theatrically staged fables that combine markers of extraordinary histories, as if an illustrated manuscript of arcane knowledge had come to life. Mining the visual language of Ottoman and Persian miniatures, as well as Chinese and northern European painting, Panoptikon refigures events of migration, trade, conquest, intellectual exchange, scientific discovery, violence, philosophy, religion, political change, and art and culture. While it might be appealing to interpret this work with reference to contemporary Istanbul, which retains visible layers of these histories, the work takes place in an unmoored speculative zone. Hüner’s hand-drawn, digitised construction is faceted with traces, figments and passings of the power of an empire — an approach to art that seems logical when urban streets are proof that parallel histories exist simultaneously. Chronometers tick through a liquid soundtrack, keeping score of time. Hüner’s interest in the psychical effects of contemporary life, steeped in technology, is filtered through aesthetic, literary and philosophical approaches. This work adopts the distinctive perspective of classical Ottoman composition, in which mythologies, past narratives and future speculations are contained within a single frame. He also mines the illusionism of Western perspective, layering components from his detailed tempera drawings on paper, some of which are reproduced in his artist book Bent 003 2007. In Panoptikon , elements of this idiosyncratic encyclopedia are combined and animated. The thirteenth-century Arabic encyclopedia Acaib’ül Mahlukat ( The Wonders of Creation ) by Zakariyya al-Kazvini is a key reference for Hüner. Translated into Turkish by the fourteenth century and widely distributed, it contained cosmology, zoology and botany, along with rich illustrations of fantastical creatures. Hüner’s drawings of fecund flora — where the squirting nectar of tulips fertilises the growth of strange organic forms — reclaim architectural expanses decorated with Iznik tile, while chuffing machines appear anachronistic, abandoned and functionless. In another sequence, mysterious instruments or weapons lie scattered on the ground as if cut from a vanitas painting. The tools of science, medicine and alchemy are combined with the possibility of past torture, the violence now dumb, a missed event. Masked and cloaked figures tinker. Human bodies are shown in states of dissection, their musculature, circulatory system and organs detailed in rich and saturated colour. Elsewhere, the two coastal promontories of Pieter Breughel’s Landscape with the fall of Icarus c.1558 is appropriated and transformed into the site of a violent and extravagant battle. And in the background of these dreamlike scenes, which are always enclosed by a cage or a room, groups of figures look on, their understanding limited to their own particular view. Naomi Evans Endnotes 1 Michel Foucault, originally published in Surveiller et Punir , 1975; Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison , trans. Alan Sheridan, Pantheon, New York, 1977. 2 Michel Foucault, ‘Panopticism’, in David M Kaplan, Readings in the Philosophy of Technology , Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Lanham, Maryland, 2004, p.359.