#i end up gesturing to objects only visible in my memory when recounting a story

[scrawlingwithstyle]

I have several types of thoughts that each "feel" different. I was wondering if anyone else experiences their thoughts like this.

Sentences that "play" in my head in a nondescript voice (almost always feels like I'm trying to say the words without moving my mouth; like the words are trapped by my tongue or something. I imagine that if I were Deaf, the feeling would be more like the words were trapped in my hands.)

Sentences that appear as images of words, or text, sometimes accompanying the voiced words

Images (the clarity on a scale of 1-5 is like a 3. Sometimes clarity fluctuates as I'm trying to pin down the exact image.)

Imagined sensations (usually from past experiences, like how the memory of touching microfiber cloth makes me have to "wipe off" the sensation), usually accompanied by images

The first two types of thoughts can be directly shared, but the other two, which are the ones I primarily use when I'm reading, writing, or daydreaming, have to go through a filter first.

Sharing those thoughts is like trying to convert a PDF file to a Word document, but the program trying to read the PDF gets some bits wrong. Or like how automatic captions can't always distinguish every single word.

[ozgeersoy]

Witnesses at Best, Bystanders at Worst

The below text was published in Giving Voice: Erkan Özgen (Sternberg Press, 2018), in conjunction with an eponymous exhibition curated by Hilde Teerlinck of the Han Nefkens Foundation and hosted by the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, November 16, 2018–February 24, 2019. 

Erkan Özgen, Purple Muslin, 2018, video still. Courtesy of the artist.

In 2016, when asked about his last will as an artist, Erkan Özgen wrote that he wishes not to pass on the burden of recent history to next generations. “I would like to leave a single will for children and to my children.” He states in his will: “Reset the memory.” [1] It is precisely this idea of reconstructing memory and the conditions of remembering that the artist investigates in his work.

Özgen’s videos do not show images from battlefields, they show what war leaves behind. The Memory of Time (2018) captures how people interact with war tools from the past; Aesthetics of Weapons (2018) portrays a man’s emotional attachment to his gun; Wonderland (2016) shows how a child who is mute and deaf narrates a war he experienced firsthand; and Purple Muslin (2018) documents how a group of women survive the systematic violence against their religious minority group. In these works, Özgen explores narrative practices related to acts of violence. As he explores testimonies through performance, language, and forms of solidarity, he proposes that witnessing is more than a legal or ethical category. 

The Memory of Time (2018) opens with a scene in which three young men sit on top of a cannon, facing a woman taking their photograph. One of them raises his fist to make a victory sign, the second claps his hands, and the last one fixes his hair in the wind. In the background, there is a family, looking aloof, sitting with their back to the cannon. In another scene, a young woman gets more intimate with the cannon as she places her head in it for a photo opportunity. In another, a young man takes a selfie and leaves the site within ten seconds. Using fragments of the footage taken at the same site, Özgen shows a series of repeated acts, as people enter and exit the frame one after another: People pose next to the cannon; they capture the moment and walk away. The next group of people walks into the picture. And repeat. 

The video does not give many clues about the site or the visitors captured by the camera. There is a little sliver of sea in the back, and small parts of buildings are visible from a distance, which do not give any immediate hints about the location. Also, the video is without sound: the viewers don’t hear what the visitors talk about or hear their language to guess their cultural background. Instead, Özgen wants them to concentrate on the repetition of bodily gestures. He creates a sense of anonymity, which helps him to investigate the act of habitually looking. 

Özgen’s camera always remains on the sidelines. The artist does not intervene in the scenes or engage with his subjects—he only observes them. (With the ubiquity of cameras and photographers, visitors seem unaware of his presence). The camera records many moments of people taking photographs with the cannon but cannot capture how these images are negotiated between the photographed and their future viewers. On the one hand, one could argue that the documentation of the self next to a war tool consumes or desensitizes the historical site of war, as it does not amount to more than an exhibition of faces and bodies. On the other hand, this particular documentation can offer performative narratives about how individuals remember wars and battlefields, as the meaning of the image waits to be negotiated through social interactions. Without making a moral judgment, Özgen plays with this opposition and our presumptions about what a competent witness might be. 

Aesthetics of Weapons (2018) is a continuation of the artist’s exploration of how individuals relate to weapons—weapons as desired objects rather than tools of violence. The work shows a man speaking about the attraction he’s had to his gun since he bought it in the mid-1990s. “Every so often, I touch all of its curves with my hands, just like I would touch a woman’s body,” the man explains. “And then I kiss it to express my feelings for it.” Here the gun represents something more than a weapon designed for inflicting physical harm or damage or a political issue around reliance on weapons. This particular attachment seems to be more than mere fetishism as well. The story implies that the pistol is not only eroticized but becomes an ideal object and a living being—“a life partner I have been carrying with me for years.” 

The video shows close-ups of the man gripping, caressing, and speaking about his pistol. In one of the scenes, he walks away from the camera, pulls his gun out of its holster, turns back, aims at Özgen’s camera, and pulls the trigger—his arms fully extended. At this point, the two acts of shooting meet each other. Özgen’s camera confronts the gun that is not synonymous with violence or protection anymore; it presents the artist’s own difficulty in questioning it as an object with emotional value, where a discussion of witnessing or violence becomes inaccessible. 

In contrast to these two works where weapons are separated from a memory about violence, Wonderland (2016) presents a witness account, this time of a boy who is mute and deaf, as he uses bodily gestures, hand language, and facial expressions to narrate a series of recent acts of violence. The young boy moves his arms back and forth to recount a scene with people shooting machine guns; his hands and mouth mimic the movement of rockets; his throwing gestures imply the use of grenades; he points at a bottle of water to talk about the water shortage. He also narrates more direct encounters with violence: he sits on the floor, reenacting a scene where someone is blindfolded with hands handcuffed behind his back, who the next moment, gets shot from the back of his head. Towards the end of the video, the boy describes decapitation with minimal gestures. This time, Özgen sits on the floor, directly facing his subject. 

The video is taken in a safe place conducive for a dialogue. Özgen and the boy communicate in what looks like a temporary lodging, as suggested by empty walls and the cupboard in the back, with a TV, DVD player, and plastic bags, with no personal items at all. “Thirteen-year-old Muhammed fled the Syrian town of Kobanî with his family when ISIS attacked it in 2015,” Özgen says over our Skype conversation as he sits in his living room in Diyarbakir. “When the family escaped to Derik, my hometown in southeastern Turkey, he was one of the very few who were eager to talk about what they had experienced.” 

However, Wonderland does more than simply transmitting a war narrative or presenting an eyewitness account as evidence to human suffering. In contrast with the physicality and severity of the circumstances that form the boy’s narrative, the title marks a fictional place, through which the artist explores the perception of war as a remote and abstracted site for those who feel safe in their own reality. Özgen confronts his viewers with how they engage with war witnesses and often fail to acknowledge their own complicity.

Özgen is aware that images do not act as tools that immediately produce a field of action against what is recorded. Testimonies, however, open the interpretation of recorded acts, their reasons and consequences. It is to this space of continuous debate that the artist is committed to contribute with his images. In a time when the attention economy becomes more and more competitive, his insistence on the repetition and the reappearance of testimonies is as crucial to their impact as what they depict.

Similar to Wonderland, Purple Muslin (2018) captures firsthand accounts of war. The video documents a group of Yazidi refugee women who fled the war zones of northern Iraq. Filmed in a refugee camp, the work shows interviews with around ten women who speak about their hometown, their memories of the violence carried out by ISIS, as well as what keeps them together as a community. They provide accounts of how ISIS fighters killed, kidnapped, abused adults and children, how people died from thirst and starvation, and how they tried to survive in the camp. 

Özgen’s camera captures most of the women in their living spaces, in tents, with stacks of beddings and mattresses in the back. There are few personalized items, one or two teddy bears next to the children, suggesting the temporality of these spaces as well as the impossibility of creating a sense of belonging in the liminal space the refugees inhabit after a major trauma. In one of the scenes, a woman with white hair and aged skin speaks about her psychological distress: she confuses her children’s names, puts sugar into food instead of salt, and does not remember her age: “Maybe twenty, or thirty, or forty years.” “It looks like I have no mind,” she continues. “My whole body aches. Nevertheless it is still good.” At this point she directly faces the camera. 

In another scene, a young woman sits on a rock with her back against the barbed wire and directly confronts the camera, telling about the work conditions in the camp. Speaking about the lack of jobs, she states that domestic work is the only thing they have: “You sleep at night and wake up but the work is the same.” The direct eye contact suggests that these women do not consider themselves simply as victims of violence. They create a space for self-representation that demands visibility, recognition, and engagement from the viewers themselves. Thereby the work not only represents a group of subjects, it also becomes an instrument for them to address the potential viewers and make their civil claims public. 

The video goes back and forth between images of talking heads captured in intimate settings and the aerial views shot by a drone, remote from the stories in the camp. After listening to a woman’s account about how she suffers from trauma, the viewers find themselves wondering at the grid formed by tents and temporary structures in the camp, or observing, from a distance, children playing next to UNHCR, UNESCO, and UNICEF signs. In another scene, as the camera shows the streets of the camp, a woman states, “There is protection all around us but we are as afraid as before.” The juxtaposition of this narrative with the drone and street shots does more than give information about the living conditions of the refugees—it creates an estrangement effect to push the viewers to contemplate their own position. The artist asks the viewers not to see the work as a direct document of a trauma but as a tool to question their own position as witnesses. 

In the video, Özgen also shows that there is no consistent voice among the refugees who sit in front of his camera. Some want to go back to their homeland, while others say they will never return, as nothing remains the same and the family is destroyed: “I do not think we can live those old happy days again.” Despite the lack of consensus about the idea of returning to their home, the artist chooses to emphasize the forms of solidarity among his subjects. 

The work portrays women who speak about the rituals of their community—how they celebrate the sacred month, how they marry, how they share food in communal celebrations. In the middle of the video, a young woman places her scarf on the ground outside a tent (hence the title, Purple Muslin). In the next scenes, different women visit this site, placing various items on the scarf, including a string relic, a piece of hair, and other materials with symbolic value. This act of collecting materials with healing power shows a sense of solidarity and collective effort for endurance. Towards the end of the work, an older woman makes a braid from the pieces that different women cut from their hair: “We will be stronger and we will rescue and protect each other.” 

Özgen’s images do not speak the imperative. They circulate individual testimonies over and over again to contribute to the existing debates about memory and contemporary history. They act as a device of inquiry, much more than a device of documentation. The artist’s work resists generic narratives of war and encourages the viewers to question their own position in the contemporary economy of visual attention—at best as witnesses and at worst as passive bystanders. Özgen reminds us that image-making is not simply a political act to record: it offers a tool to imagine how human suffering is perceived and constantly reinterpreted to inform the present and the possible futures. As our Skype conversation comes to an end, Özgen pauses between words when he says: “We are all potential refugees.”

[1] Özgen’s statement about his last will was published on m-est.org as part of Vasiyetimdir (2016–ongoing), an online series initiated by artists Aslı Çavuşoğlu, Merve Ünsal, and myself, which explores how artworks will subsist over long periods of time.