Nazlan Ertan
Six neon figures that light up a single wall at Istanbul’s Pera Museum make
no sense until you read the title, “A Few Hours After the Revolution.”
Then you realize that the neon letters duplicate the Turkish word DEVRIM
(Revolution) in capital letters after the letters have been altered by
anti-revolutionaries or police. In Turkey, leftists often write "devrim"
on walls only to have the graffiti quickly made incomprehensible by
others.
For someone who has lived in Turkey during the left-right clashes on the streets before the 1980 military coup and, to a lesser degree, during the 2013 Gezi Park revolt in Istanbul, this distorted version of “devrim” is almost as familiar as its correct writing.
Cavusoglu’s neon work is part of Pera Museum’s summer exhibition
“Doublethink: Double vision” that brings together a group of
international artists around the Orwellian concept of “doublethink.” The
term, one of the pillars of George Orwell’s dystopian novel "1984," was
defined by the writer as a tool of the state to control the way the
individual thought. It referred to the ability to hold two contradictory ideas at the same time and to forget any fact that became inconvenient.
In the last five years, Orwell’s "1984" became a buzzword to explain
the new world of politics, with its totalitarian tone and doctored
truths. "1984" has been used to refer to Donald Trump’s America, Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey. Orwell also made its strong comeback to the culture scene as "1984" topped the book lists in Russia in 2015 and in the United States in 2017, and tickets for the play "1984" sold like hotcakes in Bertonov Hall at the Habima Theater in Tel Aviv, Israel.
As last in the chain of "1984"-inspired events, Istanbul’s Pera
Museum presented a selection that included the works of Tracey Emin,
Marcel Dzama, Anselm Kiefer, Bruce Nauman, Raymond Pettibon, Thomas Ruff
and Turkish artists' reinterpreting Orwell.
“Orwell was no prophet,” Alistair Hicks, the curator for the
exhibition, told Al-Monitor in a written interview. “He was writing
about the world of the 1940s which was dominated by totalitarian
regimes. He wrote the book in 1948 and just switched the last two
digits. [But] he would not recognise the use of doublethink as expressed
by many of the artists in 1984.”
The exhibition does not seek to duplicate Orwell’s concept of
doublethink, where the state denies the individual the right to his own
thoughts. On the contrary, Moscow conceptualists such as Pavel Pepperstein,
who have inspired this exhibition, flip the concept of doublethink back
to the state. For them, doublethink is a form of resistance to what the
state imposes and a beginning where the artists can freely play with
text and image. “You probably think of doublethink as a negative
concept. We in Russia think of it as just the beginning,” Pepperstein is
quoted as saying in the Pera Museum's press statement.
What Pepperstein said about doublethink being a form of resistance
“has become the norm, a norm that is actually echoed around the world.
Politicians everywhere are trying to exploit doublethink. And people
everywhere are resisting with their own doublethinking,” Hicks told
Al-Monitor.
In the spirit of doublethink/double vision, the exhibition takes up
the changing relationship between text and image. In Pepperstein’s
acrylic on canvas, a Zen-like figure with two faces where his brain is
supposed to be stretches his arms to both sides. The title is “Double
Thin King.”
Kader Attia, an Algerian artist who grew up in the suburbs of Paris,
has placed three books on different pedestals and secured them in place
with barbed wire. All of them are about Guantanamo and the title of the work is “Nothing Has Changed.”
Several works by Turkish artists refer to the Armenian tragedy in the
way they take up doublethink — a wink to the fact that the Turkish
people are reluctant to use the G-word (“Genocide”) although they know
that Armenians were killed. Hera Buyuktasciyan’s sculpture “Letters From
a Lost Paradise” is made of moving wooden blocks that resemble letter
stamps in the Armenian alphabet. In an interview in 2015, Buyuktasciyan
recalled the words of her grandmother: “If you lose your language, you
lose your identity” — the very idea of “newspeak” in "1984," which sought to create another, more malleable identity in Oceania by taking the meaning out of certain words.
For Cavusoglu, the silver lining of "1984" is the possibility of an
erring totalitarian regime. Describing her recent work, which opened simultaneously with the Biennale in Venice, she told Al-Monitor that the Turkish regime’s “moment of error” came during last year’s attempted military coup.
“What we saw in the July 15 attempted coup was the realization that
Turkey’s institutions had become an empty shell,” she told Al-Monitor.
Her recent project in Venice wanted to outline uncertainty, unpredictability and polarization. The project, called “Future Tense,”
is a newspaper where the day’s news is interpreted by fortunetellers,
astrologers and clairvoyants. “Parallel to the increasing censorship and
move away from being a state of law, a number of fortunetellers and
astrologers emerged. Astrologers and clairvoyants were getting invited
to newscasts, warning us about bombs by looking at the angles of the
stars in the skies, providing us with a date for a rebellion depending
on the position of Mars. The way they play with the language helps them
avoid any censorship. I found 50 soothsayers of different political
orientation and ethnicity and asked them what they thought would happen.
They replied in their own way — and a very pluralistic paper [which
Cavusoglu distributed in Venice] was published,” she said.
“The different clairvoyants have found a way to escape censorship in a
totalitarian regime. I aim to show both with my made-up newspaper and
with my work in the Pera Exhibition that censorship creates a new
language,” Cavusoglu said, echoing Pepperstein's statement that
doublethink is just a beginning, in art as in politics.
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