Koloni

The artworks of “Koloni” similarly vacillated between explicitness and obscurity. Despite modest external promotion, at the same time, curators didn’t hold back in presenting overtly queer or trans themes to those who had ventured past the security guard. The ground floor, for instance, featured a video by Dynasty Handbag, Oh, Hummingbird (2017), a psychedelic music video starring artist Jibz Cameron’s alter ego wearing a nude suit drawn with female genitals while singing a ballad about a hummingbird having to navigate a polluted natural environment. You couldn’t miss the sound of Dynasty Handbag’s singing, though the small monitor was placed on the floor, perhaps obscuring details of her outfit unless you crouched down.

Back in the more esoteric direction were İris Ergül’s Vertebrae (2017), which is a set of amoebic-looking islands of latex and fake fur rising up from the floor—resembling both human and animal parts, internal organs and exteriors. The events in Gökçe Yiğitel’s video recording of a two-hour performance Proteus (2017) were hard to discern in the sunlit space, but the physical remnants involved an audio recording of a 12-minute guided meditation and an “incubation site” comprising a piece of glass, where various bacterial growths were encased in agar and labeled. Also deploying a piece of glass as its surface was Yavuz Erkan’s messy, painterly composition of diverse materials—including “kidney stone(s) of a mother,” “home-grown K3[Fe(CN)6] (Potassium Ferricyanide) single crystal(s),” “broken piece(s) of a brown glass bottle,” bleach and apple cider vinegar, and the handle of a black plastic bag—which had an enigmatic appeal.

Birds—and post-internet aesthetics—returned in several works on the second floor upstairs, including Katja Novitskova’s massive photographic cut-out (sourced online) of a red bird’s curling beak and head, Approximation Mars I, “Assemblage Version” (2014), which sits on a bed of correspondingly bright-red aquarium pebbles and blurs all the lines between the natural and artificial realms. Similarly exploring the crossovers between nature and scientific study, Ursula Mayer’s film Atom Spirit (2016–17) imagines a quasi-futuristic, female-led team of scientists collecting DNA from natural locations in Trinidad and Tobago—including from hummingbirds. Meanwhile, Kerem Ozan Bayraktar’s Mimicry (2017) installation and video depicts a flower production factory that is more online retail fulfillment center than greenhouse.

Even more difficult to parse—particularly in the absence of texts about the works—were Yasemin Nur’s installation Permeate (2017), a room-installation of squares of old pieces of paper arrayed on old wooden furniture and boxes, and Umut Yıldırım’s booklet resting on a red bench with red buckets of soil beneath it. The latter, titled Lungs (2017), contained poem-like lists of related things—AK-47, M16, RPG-7, for example; or various kinds of vegetables and grains—in what was described in the caption as an “inventory,” though it was unclear of what.

The significance of other works might have also passed me by if I hadn’t gleaned certain biographical or contextual subtexts from friends’ explanations. On the building’s top floor, for instance, a video work by the filmmaker collective İyi Saatte Olsunlar (“Let the Good Times Roll”), titled Raskol’s Axe (2013), is a music video of a drag performer lip-synching the 1978 song Melankoli by the diva Nükhet Duru. The video was directed by the late Boysan Yakar, who was one of the co-founders of the group, and who was known for his work as a mayoral advisor in a prominent city municipality on LGBTI issues, making him one of the only openly gay figures in Turkish politics. He and two other LGBTI activists died tragically in a car accident in September 2015. The show contained another kind of memorial, also hiding in plain sight, in the form of a newspaper sitting on an old armchair in the front foyer, that I only saw on my way out. Aykan Safoğlu’s project The Ark (2017) consisted of the artist placing remembrance ads in Turkish newspapers that—as far as I understood them—read as poetic, personal memories compared to the formal announcements surrounding them, made by families or corporations of the recently deceased.

Safoğlu’s work, like many others in “Koloni,” positioned itself in a paradoxical space:  readily visible and yet largely inscrutable, at least on an initial glance or to those inadvertently coming across them. “Koloni” itself, as with many recent cultural events and exhibitions in Turkey—including the last two editions of the Istanbul Biennial—revealed how progressive organizations, curators and artists alike are figuring out how to avoid unwanted attention from the forces of emboldened chauvinism and ethno-militarism that dominate public life in Turkey today. While this increasingly restricted space compels artists and the cultural community to be more savvy in their presentation of challenging materials—and most likely to engage in even more forms of self-censorship than before—the accessibility and legibility to the wider public of such cultural events has severely diminished. But at this point in time, even the simple fact of survival for boundary-exploring intellectual and cultural events like “Koloni” remains an achievement.

HG Masters is the editor at large of ArtAsiaPacific.

“Koloni” is on view at Abud Efendi Konağı, Istanbul, until February 3, 2018.

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