A Speculate About Processes an Artist Uses to Create a Work of Art Book
Shortlists offer thematic selections from AAA'southward Collections, including overviews and annotations by invited contributors. The following shortlist by Merve Ünsal looks at creative person books in Turkey that wrestle with narrating the unnarratable.
The creative person book is a medium ane seems to encounter often in Istanbul—in that location is an artist initiative dedicated entirely to collecting creative person books (BAS), a "laboratory" for artist books that intermittently meets to make dummy books for artists (Book Lab), a collective of artist book collectives that organise pop-upwardly events (Bandrolsüz), a photograph book fair (FUAM), and fine art book days (border_less). This is not a coincidence. In financially and architecturally precarious hubs like Istanbul, at that place is an inclination towards mediums like the creative person book, which can be produced and shared with relative facility. There is also a tradition of peer-to-peer networks that gimmicky practices stem from, similar the self-published magazines of the early 2000s and exhibiting at creative person initiatives supported past the founding artists. Many of these magazines, which remain crucial resource today, were published by individuals or creative person-initiatives rather than publishing houses. For ameliorate or for worse, the absence of public funding bodies, institutions, and archives has fostered generations of artists able to self-initiate, self-publish, and self-showroom.
There is also a sensibility of working with artist books that can be traced to the 2010s in Turkey. The struggle to build and sustain narratives amidst the political, social, and cultural histories of Turkey—marked by coups, ruptures, and promises of often dramatic ideological shifts—accept produced works that deal with the inability, or the desire non to narrate. The structural weaknesses of narrative gave birth to forms that not only expose those weaknesses themselves only likewise articulate without narrating.
For artists in Turkey in the 2010s, the artist book has served every bit a site of narration and self-historicisation, a public space to tell stories that were untold or undertold. Through this medium, collectivities of dialogue form tentatively beyond times and spaces, building a cooperative resilience through the pages of these creative person books. Information technology is thus possible to interpret this trend of artist books as an adaptation that can shift as chop-chop as narrations tend to shift in the detail case of Turkey. The creative person books below use speculation as a method of remembering and narrating—each a tape of the tenuous relationships between images, texts, and the printed page—edifice on the tension that can be between these acts.
There are some shared urgencies and artistic strategies in this choice. The glace nature of photography is a topic explored in one form or some other by many of the artists—employing photography not to produce narratives, simply to debunk the nature of the medium to support and to create narratives. The parafictional appears as a strategy that exposes the vulnerabilities of the trend to create narratives that are but not at that place. Possibly most strikingly, the artist books below use fragmentation and fracturing to their advantage, claiming it as class and content. And I don't think it is a coincidence that all of these artists were built-in in the late 70s / early 80s, coming of age when mono-causal narratives of Turkey were rapidly disintegrating—visibly and openly.
İz Öztat et al., Tö, self-published, 2017 [MONS.OZI]
Epitome: Detail of page spread from Tö.
Cocky-published in 2017, Tö is a rendition of the "collaboration" between İz Öztat and Zişan. The book focuses on the story of Zişan, a queer Ottoman woman, channelled spirit, and alter ego who only appears for the viewers through fragments of her archive. The dialogic and ongoing nature of this human relationship could, on ane hand, exist continued to Turkey's not having officially recognised the Armenian Genocide of 1915. The sociocultural history of Turkey is haunted by the genocide, as Öztat channels a subject area whose story is recognisably interlinked with this contested narrative. Through and with Zişan, Öztat works with the inabilities of history and language to articulate catastrophe, equally Zişan has a life story filled with self-witting gaps. Despite its overlaps with the genre, Öztat has steered Zişan and their collaboration abroad from the parafictional, instead choosing to disown infrastructures of narration as far as possible; the incomplete narratives, the lack of details in the story, the element of actual performances, and the emphasis on collaboration through Öztat produce an ongoing dialogue.
Öztat's artistic practice points to the epigenetics of praxis, relating artists beyond time and place. As I wrote in my own forthcoming creative person volume, Where Does It Hurt, "If genetics is nature, epigenetics is figuring out how nurture works—you lot do non pass on the scar from a surgery to your offspring, but the trauma of a dearth might permanently alter the way in which your genes are expressed." Öztat'due south work, then, leads me to wonder: if trauma is passed on from generation to generation, can artistic practices that deal with traumas never showtime afresh? This book can be interpreted as a genealogical work that adapts ruptures within history through its very content.
Tö is one part of a 3-part piece of work: a sculpture, moving image, and publication. Zişan's paths cross with that of the Acephale—Acephale, a public review published by Georges Bataille five times betwixt 1936 and 1939, also as a secret society, deriving its name from the Greek for "headless." Since the Acephale group is sworn to secrecy, whether Zişan was present in their last meeting of 1939 is unclear. Quoting Zişan's autobiography, Every name in history is I and I is other, Tö traces the possibility of the encounter betwixt Zişan and the Acephale. Presented autobiographically, Tö addresses a moment in the gathering Acephale when intestines were used to call someone from beyond to the meeting.
Tö's publication is an effort to produce its own language. Past using intestines every bit a fabric in the sculpture that is and so referred to in the book, the viewers/readers are confronted with the potentials of their own physical demise through the written notes of a woman who could accept been. Through Tö, Öztat thus points to the interactions betwixt publications over fourth dimension, as well as the tentative histories built through the medium. The tension between the public review Acephale and the secret group Acephale is not unlike to the collaboration betwixt Öztat and Zişan of externalised clues pointing to internalised voids, absences, and shared secrets.
Sevim Sancaktar, Eyelids, two friends two foes, Istanbul: Fail Books, 2019 [Monday.SAS17]
Prototype: Encompass of Eyelids, two friends ii foes.
Sancaktar tackles image-making equally an act of fluid remembering. This series contains studio photographs that testify constellations of an unnamed photographer's slide-holders. The eponymous series of clinical notwithstanding-life photographs featuring birds-eye views of empty, marked-up slide-holders are in Tetris-like arrangements. Arrows, notes about light, and circles and rectangles scribbled on the articulate plastic windows all refer to absent images.
Creating a new vista from these voids, Sancaktar deals with these frames that no longer host images just rather function as referents. Sancaktar highlights the tension between the freezing act of photography and the flickering, subjective nature of viewing these constructed, fragmentary images. Sancaktar'due south diverse (re)configurations and the recurrence of some of the slide-holders beyond multiple photographs point to the constant realigning and reshuffling of images to construct new forms. By only using the frames of images, Sancaktar self-reflexively points to the human activity of framing and claims her position as that of a framer. The artist'due south creation of gaps, between the original and the re-create, between the past image and its electric current reconfiguration, point to the inevitable fallibility of memory; but for Sancaktar, the act of removal and diminishing can nonetheless frame the fluidity of remembrance as our memories are formed. Adapting the mono-perspective of the Bechers, it is possible to link Sancaktar's motivation with the Bechers' "new topographic" movement, building a new visual language through absent images. When narratives and archives of images neglect, is it possible to merits these failures every bit a topography of absences and produce narratives through these absences?
Past incorporating a tab that must exist removed in order for the volume to be read/looked at, Sancaktar draws attending to the conscious act of seeing—and subsequently, the irreversible nature of narrating. In one case told, information technology is very hard to untell. The inclusion of a fictional story in the artist book points to the multiplicity of stories that the photographs could be holding. Through a very specific formal arroyo that employs and unsettles the mechanisms of photography, Sancaktar looks at the role of photography in historicisation processes and utilises the frames as a stand up-in for the authors of those processes. Sancaktar's book reads equally a narrative of narratives, reproducing, reorganising, and reforming absences of images.
Fatma Belkıs, gidenler & kalanlar[not yet available]
Prototype: Fatma Belkıs, gidenler. Screenshot credit:
toron on Vimeo.
Fatma Belkıs'southward 2 books can be interpreted as two alternative responses to the way photography purports to convey a truth despite its subjectiveness. "Those Who Left" [Gidenler] has very tactile qualities—upon seeing the book, one wants to impact and hold information technology, to marvel at the craftsmanship that went into creating its binding, to engage in a more extensive interaction with it. This book of photographs is an object of veneration and admiration, complete with leather binding and the give-and-take "Gidenler" written in gilded letters. The well-known family album aesthetic is at play before nosotros accept even opened it. The photographs in "Those Who Left" are black-and-white, square, framed, placed on the right side of the pages. The photographs, all portraits, appear to exist taken in unlike places. The faces are blurred, which seem to be the issue of some small human activity of photographic violence. The aesthetics of the loftier-contrast photographs and the obscured faces produce a tension—this blur is the just connection between these people.
What further unites these people is that they left—each turning of the page appears to bear witness to this. The type-written, one-folio letter squeezed inside the book intensifies this cult aesthetic, establishing a relationship between the viewers who are there, the readers, and those who left (without actually revealing who these people are). The mystique of the leather-bound book is formally supported by the letter that seems to say: Yous could empathise this story if only you spent enough time here.
"Those Who Stayed" has a completely dissimilar aesthetics as an object. Sewn-bounden, zine-dimensions, rectangular-framed photographs at upper halves of the pages. The photographs show close-ups of statues which do not seem to exist aware of their "solid"ness; they give the impression that they pose from different angles. These carved-rock pieces, which we look at partly to satisfy our voyeuristic instincts, seem to tell us something about photography itself, the moment it freezes, the decontextualisation. "Those Who Stayed" evokes emotions similar to those you experience when you lot take a photograph of your lover—as though they cease within that moment, in that posture, that feeling. And maybe the ideal field of study of photography is the stone, because a stone never complains, it never moves, it is relatively easier to do the white balance than human skin.
Belkıs's two-volume artist volume appears to answer to the question of what keeping a photographic record means. The ii-part response, reinforced past the particular forms of the books, contain the contradiction of photographic narratives—fifty-fifty inside the relatively linear forms of books, the contrasting stories of absence and presence playfully point to the culling motivations for narrations.
Metehan Özcan and KartonKitap, Illustrated Information: Appendix, self-published, 2019 [Mon.KAR7]
This book is an "Appendix" in book class to Metehan Özcan's torso of piece of work, Illustrated Information. Özcan uses found images from onetime bug of magazines, his own photographs, and photographs from other sources interchangeably. A previous "version" of this work was exhibited in 2013 in Istanbul; Özcan had created superimpositions of images from different sources that were exhibited alongside matrices of photographs, thus dismantling hierarchies of images within the exhibition format. Using establish images, collages that advisable illustrations from various sources and photographs Özcan had taken himself, the book presents a map-like, indexical guide.
The idea behind Illustrated Information is to trace the volume design on its way to becoming a "book." The work is based on Özcan's exercise of gathering his images on a wall's surface and recreating randomised layers of the definitions found in the original encyclopaedia of Illustrated Information—five 100x70cm-sized, xvi-page sheets accept been treated as if they're "walls," with images juxtaposed on these surfaces. The volume, and its design, are revealed afterwards these five sheets have been folded, cut, and placed onto each other as pages. Thus, it was not the book that was designed, simply rather the status "before beingness a volume." Illustrated Data is a record of a specific material condition created by the designers. The book has been enabled to create its own visual language with a method based on a "calculated randomness."
The methodology of Illustrated Information is true to Metehan Özcan's method of making work—treating images every bit raw material that are then worked and reworked. Destabilising the processes of selection and limerick, Özcan looks at images in relation to each other, recognising their latent potentials every bit tenuous testaments of moments that were. The object of the volume serves to add together another layer of interpretation and legibility to Özcan's images, as viewers are never able to see images in full. The white space betwixt the images agree shifting relationships as the book becomes the stage on which images tease each other, producing an experience of reading that employs the imperceptible every bit a modus operandi.
Gözde Türkkan, Pay Here, self-published, 2010[Monday.TUG]
Image: Gözde Türkkan, Pay Here. Screenshot credit:
toron on Vimeo.
Gözde Türkkan often works at the intersection between the documentary and personal narrative, looking at the underbelly of marginalised groups or situations, and inserting herself into the images. With Pay Hither, she takes this effort a stride farther by producing a handmade volume that feels and reads like a diary. The book opens with an image of brightly coloured defunction that appear to reek of cigarettes through the pages of the volume—the composition of Türkkan'south images call to listen sensations that could not maybe be in the images, and nevertheless they linger. The apply of the wink and the flattened surfaces of the photographs claim an aesthetic that is forensic in the amount of particular it reveals, and the content is often raw and personal. At that place are naked bodies, pieces of food, backs of people's necks.
Selim Süme and Özgür Öğütcen, Repetition, self-published, 2015 [Monday.SUS6]
Paradigm: Selim Süme and Özgür Öğütcen, Repetition. Screenshot credit:
toron on Vimeo.
Using and manipulating eighty found passport photographs, Selim Süme has created a visual journeying in Repetition. Each image was resized and fabricated to fit the page so that, turning each page, the reader sees a different human, with eyes aligned at the same point each time. Creating a horizon line of gazes, Süme'south men all hold that await we recognise from our own passport photographs—seriously impersonal, bureaucratically brief.
The relatively simple process of isolating these portraits from their political and historical context evokes bug of power and authority, and how we position ourselves in society. While probably few countries or contexts would merits to have a casual relationship with hierarchy, within the context of Turkey, the convoluted bureaucracies inherited from the Ottoman era shifted to centralised bureaucratic processes in the 2000s. Narrating the web of relationships between bureaucracy and surveillance could be considered the modus operandi of this book. The fixed gazes of the subjects, who are unnamed and anonymised, brand possible a reversed voyeurism—the men reclaim the ability of their gaze while they are made equal, formally, through the monochromatic, treated images, while the reader/viewer has to negotiate the breaking and regaining of the gaze with the turning of each page.
Gözde İlkin, Special Passport, cocky-published, 2009 [MONS.ILG]
Paradigm: Comprehend of Special Passport.
In her exercise, Gözde İlkin uses stitching to bring together different types of fabrics. Her use of different textiles is a manner of collaging, relating to the often domestically charged spaces of these textiles. Special Passport was created in 2009 during a project titled Reciprocal Visit with a group of artists organised by the artist initiative Apartment Projection. The artist kept a journal during a road trip through Georgia, Armenia, and Iran. As the passport became a scene where the international relationships appeared while passing through the borders, the passport became an abstraction—an experience rather than the data enclosed in it.
If nosotros could all choose our passports, what kinds of information would we include? What are the means in which nosotros could appropriate bureaucracy to serve our own purposes? What kind of a communication does the passport initiate? Past using the medium of the artistic book to reproduce her fictional passport, the textures of İlkin's sewing are visually flattened, and all the same the implication of our hands and İlkin'south hands are evoked in a different way. The snapping audio of the threads equally İlkin sews—threads that are tight and hold together—remind viewers that acts of coming together could leave behind holes on the very surfaces they inhabit.
İlkin's is a passport that never had its designated part of serving every bit an official document, but her desire to interpret this document resonates perhaps even more today. A self-portrait in transition, İlkin'south reproduction is true-to-size, which underscores the means in which artist books are in dialogue with printed materials already familiar to the states. Taking the functional out of this object to critique its ofttimes dysfunctional presence in the lives of many, İlkin's passport plays with the form of the creative person'south volume to refer to a critical, charged object with a similar class, underscoring the personal, expressive potential of this object that retains its functionality only when it is not marked past the individual.
Ayfer Karabıyık, Failure Cut, Family Graveyard, cocky-published, 2019 [MONS.KAA]
Image: Cover of Failure Cut, Family Graveyard.
Ayfer Karabıyık focuses on the suspension that results from repetition—of sounds, images, things as nosotros know them—through the 2 text pieces she included in Failure Cut Family unit Graveyard. In a recent reading of the volume performed at Depo, Istanbul, in February 2020, these suspensions became even more than pronounced, as the repetition of words and sounds in the volume are really meant to be performed aloud.
As a listener/audition member, I was completely lost and had a difficult time connecting back to the texts she was reading, although I had already read them multiple times. Going dorsum to the texts after the performance, however, I realised the repetition was a strategy she was as well using in the writing of the text, which I had not sufficiently performed while reading (instead allowing my mind to skip over the repetitions). Failure Cut Family Graveyard is an estimation of those moments when words lose their meaning, when nosotros repeat them to ourselves, or when an paradigm starts to get blurry and unclear upon closer inspection. Karabıyık evokes and expands these moments through claiming that suspended moment as a materiality in her texts.
Karabıyık works with the ability of text to extend and compress sounds to produce moments of break that are, in turn, reflected in the physicalities we project on to what we are reading. This piece of work serves equally a subtitle to the artist'due south practice, equally she ever deals with the fickleness of what nosotros see or sense, stretching-out the words and sounds comprising the narratives of what we could be looking at. This gesture of making visible the artifice of language every bit a slippery conveyor of significant transforms this volume into a text that one can't help merely return to multiple times, each time deriving dissimilar interconnections between the words on the page.
Maria Sturm & Cemre Yeşil, For Birds' Sake, Madrid: La Fabrica Editorial, 2015 [MON.YEC3]
Image: Maria Sturm and Cemre Yeşil, For Birds' Sake. Screenshot credit:
toron on Vimeo.
Istanbul has always been a very important city for aviculture, perhaps in part due to its geographical location for bird migration; and at that place are many various social platforms devoted to the keeping and breeding of birds. This book is nearly the birdmen of Istanbul and focuses on the human relationship between the bird and the birdman. The migration story of birds are particularly poignant today as Istanbul'due south new airport—a mega project of pride—is built on the migration route.
for bird's sake is an intimate, layered portrait of this relationship that reveals the artists' conflicts over what they have been observing. Each edition of the book is unique, and they are "shrouded" like the cages in which the birdmen keep their beloved birds. The gesture of "unshrouding" this book, then, becomes akin to the pleasures of voyeurism and possession, which the artists play with throughout. The photographs range in genre—documentary portraits, seemingly instantaneous snapshots, photographs of rooms more than akin to still life than architectural images in their precision of composition and understated aesthetics. Through this flow, the artists announced to unravel the procedure of looking at what is non familiar—they empathise, but they don't; they sympathize, just they don't. This tension builds tenderly over the course of the book, which is perchance the only ane in this selection that creates the narrative experience of becoming implicated in a story previously unknown.
The notion of possession is painfully complicated in the context of Turkey—where all the photographs are taken—as the language around ownership is embedded inside the gender dynamics of photography. The female person photographers' gaze not only subverts the traditional male gaze, but besides scrutinises the human relationship of possession rather than the objects of possession. While this gesture does not by itself transform that relationship, the subtlety with which this act is conducted reveals the nuances of looking, documenting, narrating. The images in this volume are throbbing with a sceptical tenderness that I find refreshing.
Işıl Eğrikavuk, Nether the Same Roof, Istanbul: British Council, 2011[Mon.EGI]
Image: Cover of Under the Same Roof.
Işıl Eğrikavuk is an artist who creates, performs, and documents absurd situations that stalk from the newspaper daily. Eğrikavuk's daily is very much inspired and enabled past the media; she previously wrote a column for the now-defunct daily newspaper Radikal, titled Güncel Sanat Kafası [A Contemporary Fine art Mentality].
Under the Same Roof is different from other titles in this option in that the focus is the creative person's practice, and therefore could also be considered a monographic publication. I would group information technology with the rest, however, in that Eğrikavuk's practice shares many affinities with the other artists hither in her manipulation and contortion of what is familiar, weaving narratives at the boundaries of the fictional and non-fictional. The absurd is the material Eğrikavuk pokes at to trigger viewers to ask, "What if…?"
A revealing case is Eğrikavuk's Infamous Library, a video that narrates the story of twelve people who were kidnapped in September 1980 (12 September 1980 is the date of the terminal "successful" military coup in Turkey) by an unidentified organisation and held convict in a library for ii years. For the 11th Istanbul Biennial (2009), Eğrikavuk turned Infamous Library into a news article and had it published in two national newspapers: Radikal and Hürriyet Daily News. The work later became an installation and is still ongoing. Equally narratives around the armed forces coups—before and after—are frequently biased and hazy, Eğrikavuk points to the dubiety that comes with annihilation to emerge from that time. It is terrifying, equally a viewer, to be uncertain of the fictionality of what 1 is seeing.
There are two formal aspects of the book that are worth noting: the 2 languages for the texts—Turkish and English language—office separately, every bit in, you have to flip and plow over the book to access the other linguistic communication. Information technology is an apt solution for a book whose content relies on the specificities of the languages. The other conclusion is to include the black screens from the videos, which is a tool that the artist uses to disrupt the flow of information and point to the making of images, adding some other layer of self-awareness to the book.
Merve Ünsal is an creative person based in Istanbul. In her work, she employs text and photography, extending both beyond their class.
Source: https://aaa.org.hk/en/ideas/ideas/shortlist-speculation-as-method
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