The Seventh Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

Your drawing practice provides a grounding for all of your work. What is your conceptual approach to drawing and how does it relate to your video works? I have been drawing since I was five years old. As a vital, daily activity, drawing was always with me to embody the images torn from my mind by a gestural act. Line helped me to create a position between the external world and myself. It operates like a channel making me realise the traces of reality touching me at an emotional level. Every day I am collecting these broken images and placing them against the images thrown into this world. This creates a confrontational space where I can find subconscious routes to follow traces of the social in my mind. Even though the spontaneous fluidity of drawing offers an opportunity of self-expression, as soon as the line appears on the paper surface it reveals elements reminiscent of the tradition of representation in art history. Art history operates as a kind of threat at this point, so the possibilities of self-expression should be continuously tested. That’s why I craft a different bond with the world by studying and appropriating the press, magazine, animal and botanic photographs accumulated in my atelier. I give the line a chance to freely express my subconscious and I also draw the line into a payoff with the external world. Research positions my work within a conceptual framework, it points to the limits of drawing and facilitates the movement to the moving image. Drawing gives me the courage to resist visible reality and carry on my research. Could you explain the genesis of the work presented in APT7, Broken manifestos 2010? I started working on Broken manifestos when I was in Paris with a grant from SAM Art projects. The world is quite hectic now; every opinion expresses itself in public space and reaches us wherever we are in the world. The masses were on the streets of Paris while the so-called Arab Spring was evolving, the Middle East was in revolt and I was observing all this with the charge of my memories from my undergraduate years just before the 1980 coup d’état in Turkey. My own personal history and generation were perpetually shaped and dissociated by political phases in Turkey . . . I thought about how to reflect the personal and cultural memories of communities, their deep wounds. I came up with an enormous fresco; it was like details from a history of a very long and timeless revolt. It took months to plan the individual figures and groups. After hundreds of drawings and green- screen shootings, all materials were laid onto the ground and I walked through them for days. How do you conceive the work’s three video channels — referred to as ‘ Demonstrations ’ , ‘ Violence ’ , and ‘ Immigrants ’ — as thematic strands of the work? In ‘Demonstrations’, actors directly look at us and carry banners which feature elements frommy visual vocabulary. The preliminary drawings I made for this work re-appear as words on these banners. The belly dance is very important in this piece since it is a response to the representation systems the East has been subjected to for ages; the dance is joyful and it cannot distance itself from implications of terror. For ‘Violence’, the setting is a steppe, girls are on stage and in the front row you see a series of leg movements seeming like an ungendered can-can, or activities for Youth and Sports Day (May 19). Fields burn in the distance and public residences rise up. The steppes between Ankara and Polatlı where I spent my childhood intrude in spite of me. I dedicated this scene to girls. In relation to ‘Immigrants’, issues of identity have been a major concern of mine. This piece might relate to European identity and cultural impositions. Dogs . . . Street dogs of Istanbul . . . It is possible to read them like a novel again and again to discover new associations. It is like seeing the scenes of a very long film all at once . . . I think this triptych reflects the world we currently dwell in. Political philosopher Giorgio Agamben has stated in Means without End: Notes on Politics that, ‘Gesture is a moment of life subtracted from the context of individual biography as well as the moment of art subtracted from the neutrality of aesthetics: it is pure praxis.’ The figures in Broken manifestos perform small acts that resonate with Agamben’s description of gesture as politically productive. Could you speak about the importance of gesture in your work and how you developed the various movements and choreographies performed in Broken manifestos ? I must say that reading Agamben and Judith Butler had a great impact on my work. I think the question of avoiding representation carried me to this point and I started working on gesture. My effort can be interpreted in the sense of protecting the subject as female against the ideological discourses it was subjected to. I work with students from the Yildiz Teknik University Faculty of Art and Design, which has an interdisciplinary approach. Before I start working with dance students I ask them to forget everything they knew about dance. With elastic pyjamas on, they started to move within a space in between their own body and a second one. These short movements sometimes reflected pre-planned drawings or the dancers discovered new gestures after a phase of frenzy. It was very important to reveal the memories of the adolescent body. The body on the edge of gender. I think it is exactly at this point that I meet Butler and Agamben . . . This was also a way to refrain from structured identities; social gestures created the movements continuously looping with adolescent hormones and temporarily suspended the bodies. The trace of Agamben in ‘Immigrants’ is more accentuated; this is also relevant for my earlier work New Citizen . The crisis created by the refugee pushed me towards the re-discovery of the body. It was important to catch the traces of totalitarian regimes in bodily gestures; it opened a venue for exploration beyond rationality. I could only reveal the relation between the ruling violence and the violence protecting the rules through such energy. Interviewed by Kathryn Weir, September 2012. INCI EVINER An interview 113