Pretty Furious Women

Pretty Furious Women
Installation, 4 Digital Posters, 1 Hand Painted Poster, Video

In the past decade in Turkey, violence against women and murders for ‘honor killing’ escalated drastically. According to statistics, five women are murdered each day. People who murder women got remission and are freed after several years in prison. On the other hand, women who defend themselves or kill the perpetrator of violence against them are punished severely—even more so than their male counterparts. To fight against injustice, Turkish women began a new struggle recently, encouraging each other to defend themselves and gain their legal rights of self-defence.

Inspired from this phenomenon Pretty Furious Women project was designed for Jakarta Biennale. For three weeks, I have learned a traditional martial art called Beksi Silat. The learning process is retold in a series of B-movie-styled posters and a 3 minute movie trailler.

Bir Kadına Ürkütmeden Nasıl Dokunursunuz?/ How to properly touch a girl so you don’t creep her out?

Bir Kadına Ürkütmeden Nasıl Dokunursunuz?

Renkli Video (bulunmuş görüntü), 2015
Tadımlık: https://vimeo.com/manage/153373045

“Bir Kadına Ürkütmeden Nasıl Dokunursunuz?” videosu Youtube arama motoruna “Nasıl kadınları tavlarım?” sorusu sorulduğunda karşımıza çıkan videolardan oluşturulmuş bir kolaj video. Hayat Koçları ve PUA’ler (Kadın Tavlama Sanatçıları) kendilerine özel ve herkesin erişimine açık Youtube kanalları üzerinden “Kadınlar ne ister?, Kadınlar üzerinde nasıl cazibe yaratabilirsiniz? Telefonlarını nasıl istemelisiniz? Kadını eve atabilmek için onu arkadaşlarından nasıl ayırmalısınız?, Bir kadını ürkütmeden ona nasıl dokunabilirsiniz?” vs. gibi soruların “sözde” cevaplarını paylaşıyorlar. Kendinden menkul hayat koçları, şaibeli uzmanlar ve PUA’ler (Pick-up Artist) kadın tavlama sanatının detaylarını anlatırken eril söylemin yeni ve popüler mecraları ortaya seriliyor.

How to properly touch a girl so you don’t creep her out?

Color Video (found footage), 19’ 10’’, 2015
Extract: https://vimeo.com/manage/153373045

The videos used in this work are the first videos that YouTube search engine suggests when “How to pick-up a girl?” question is typed. Life coaches and PUA’s (Pick-up Artists) share their “knowledge” on YouTube channels accessible to and free for everyone around the following questions: What do women want? How to attract women? How to ask their telephone numbers? How to “isolate” them in order to convince them going home with you? How to touch a woman without creeping her out? etc. While self-proclaimed life coaches, shady experts and PUAs give details of picking up women, new and popular mediums of masculine expression come forward.   

Kendine Ait Bir Banyo/ A Bathroom of One's Own

Kendine Ait Bir Banyo

Renkli Video (bulunmuş görüntü), 17’ 20’’, 2015
Tadımlık:https://vimeo.com/133651773

“Kendine Ait Bir Banyo” videosu bizi, herkesin erişimine açık web platformlarına gönüllü olarak yükledikleri videolar aracılığıyla erkeklerin banyolarına, dolayısıyla özel anlarına bakmaya davet ediyor. Çalışma, kullanıcıların saç tarama, kurutma, şekillendirmeyle ilgili tecrübelerini paylaştıkları YouTube videolarından oluşturulmuş bir kolaj video. Kameranın önünde dakikalarca saç şekillendirmenin püf noktalarını gösteren erkekler bir yandan sıradan bilginin gösterişli bir performansını sergilerken, diğer yandan güçle eşitlenen erkekliğin kırılganlığına ve erotizmine kendi açtıkları dikiz deliğinden bakmaya davet ediyorlar.

A bathroom of one’s own

Color Video (found footage), 17’ 20’’, 2015

Extract: https://vimeo.com/133651773

The video “A bathroom of one’s own” sneaks into men’s bathrooms and have a peek to their intimate moments, which they voluntarily share on an open web platform. The work is a collage of various homemade videos that ordinary users upload on YouTube to share their experience about how to comp, dry, shape and style their hair. Those men, who show hair style techniques for minutes in front of the camera, not only present an imposing performance of casual information, but also invite us to their peep hole to observe the fragility and eroticism of manhood which is equalized to power.

At the Edge of all Possibles

At the Edge of all Possibles

Lecture Performance, 2014

In his essay titled The Storyteller (1936), Walter Benjamin observes that he encounters storytellers less and less, claiming that information has superseded experience in the modern world. After 78 years, after the best and worst days of our lives, after a great resistance wherein many emotions have obtained new meanings, we found ourselves standing before a giant archive of analysis, texts, videos and images. “How to represent resistance or uprisings in an artistic field?” is an ongoing discussion since 2000's and there are a variety of trials around the subject. After the Gezi Uprising, we found ourselves engaged with the same question as well, in an increasing pace. Yet, personally, I was reflecting upon a possible "lack" by asking: "In this era of excessive information, is there anything left not represented?" Could this lack be the "epic side of the truth" (as Benjamin defined), the human story, emotions, and affects?

In this lecture performance, I would like to try going back to the basics of storytelling where the storyteller builds a story to preserve and spread the shared human experience: a story that anyone can connect without knowing the facts or where the events took place and the chronology; a story that can only exist within something bigger than one's existence, only in a moment in which the body and the self dissolve in the body of the resistance, in which there is no “I”, and “we” changes its meaning. The sole tool of the story would be the oldest tool of mankind’s experience sharing: the human voice.

Bildiğim Her Şey/ Everything I know

Bildiğim her şey 

Kağıt üzerine dijital baskı, 2015

“Bildiğim Her Şey” bir insanın ömrü boyunca bildiği, unuttuğu, yeniden hatırladığı, öğrendiği her şeyin kaydını tutmaya çalışan ve imkansızlık sınırlarında dolaşan bir çalışma. Bilgiyle enformasyonun, özelle evrenselin, objektifle sübjektifin sınırlarının bulanıklaştığı bu çalışma bilgiyi hiçbir kategorizasyona tâbi tutmadan üst üste yığarak işlevsizleştiriyor. Bu biçare derleme çabası, bilme mefhumu üzerinden, toplumsal olanla bireysel olan arasındaki muhayyel ayrım çizgilerini sorgulamayı kışkırtıyor.   

Everything I know

Digital print on paper, 2015-ongoing

“Everything I Know”, which becomes near impossible, tries to keep track of things which anybody know, forget, remember and learn during their lifetime by noting down everything the artist knows.  Blurring lines between information and knowledge, special and universal, objective and subjective, this work disables information by accumulating them without practicing any kind of categorization. Losing its time wise dimension due to being sorted in one place, this accumulation implicates that boundaries and the potential of information re-shape again and again according to social experience of individual. This helpless effort to collect provokes questioning the imaginary division line between the social and the personal through the notion of knowing.