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Photo documentation of KARDELEN CICI’s live performance, costumes by Lale İnceoğlu, at “The Shape of Things,” KoloniX, Istanbul, 2020. Courtesy Factory 20/20.
The performance artist Kardelen Cici zipped like a hummingbird around the brimming interior of KoloniX, a new art space in Istanbul, at the opening of “The Shape of Things,” an all-women design show reflecting on the legacy of Bauhaus. KoloniX’s inaugural exhibition was conceived by Factory 20/20, a curatorial team of five art history revisionists determined to prioritize the role of women, including those representing LGBTQ and ethnic minorities, in the cultural production of Turkey, where such perspectives remain grossly absent from most mainstream curatorial narratives.
Trained as an industrial designer, the precedence of the Bauhaus movement and its century of inspired incarnations buoyed Cici (pronounced Gee-Gee) as she fluttered out of the blue into KoloniX wearing a skintight costume from Lale İnceoğlu’s Cosmic Love series (2016). Cici waved her cape, flashing cobalt, scarlet, and ivory colors as she ran through the crowds toward a back studio.
As her eyes beamed through a slit in her mask, Cici exuded an electrifying energy that matched the vibrancy of April Key’s neon light sculptures, which put an industrial spin on the Art Deco environs pictured in vintage Kodachrome negatives that Key found at an Istanbul flea markets.
Inspired by a video of Margarete Hastings’ 1970 restaging of The Triadic Ballet (1922) by Bauhaus luminary Oskar Schlemmer, Cici assimilated the mechanical aesthetics of his avant-garde choreography. The performance was devised in collaboration with photographer Sila Yalazan, whom Cici had met during a Pride Week event at alternative Istanbul bar in 2019 (the Pride March has been banned in Turkey since 2015, forcing celebrations underground).
At KoloniX, the live performance resurrected the motions captured in Yalazan’s four multiple-exposure portraits and a video of Cici dancing against a backdrop of sharp triangles. In one photograph, she emerges from under the cape worn at the live performance, spanning their lengths like wings as she stands tall on tiptoes. In other images—wearing vividly hued, retrofuturist costumes again by İnceoğlu and displayed at the art space—Cici strikes an array of poses, including one where she extends her arms and legs like planks parallel to the floor.
With form recalling her education in ballet, Cici exacted a pastiche of right angles within the columned interior of KoloniX’s unconventional art space, creating precise geometries with her limbs, moving in stiff lines and tight swirls. Her approach was reminiscent of movement vocabularies established by seminal modern dancer Merce Cunningham. With careful modes of repetition, Cici projected the industrial power of the female body.
As in one of Yalazan’s photographs, Cici abruptly raised her cape and sprinted through KoloniX, past emerging artist Özge Çokgezen’s debut video installation, A Period of Colorful Actions (2020). Expressing the post-truth idea that individual belief creates new facts, the video flashes on-screen text: “I said, ‘I am an artist,’ and then became one.” Çokgezen then appears silhouetted and costumed, dancing over blooming flowers to symbolize the experiential plurality of her truth.
“The Shape of Things” presented a sense of aesthetic cohesion across media, seen for instance in the correlation between the color-blocking effect in Yalazan’s video with Key’s neon sculptures and İnceoğlu’s bold, visionary costumes. But more viscerally engaging was Cici, in full regalia, enlivening the surrounding artworks and performing multiple exposures in time with her ultramodern, Neo-Bauhaus choreography.
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