How will the weather be tomorrow?
Mehtap Baydu, Aslı Çavuşoğlu, Ahmet Doğu İpek, Özlem Günyol & Mustafa Kunt, Pınar Öğrenci, Ahmet Öğüt & Fino Blendax, Cengiz Tekin
Organisiert von Özlem Günyol & Mustafa Kunt
27. April - 16. Juni 2018

Looking at today’s weather and judging what it may be like tomorrow (?)

Looking at today’s weather and misjudging what it will be like tomorrow (?)

The weather rarely changes suddenly,

but sometimes it can.

A sudden storm and whoosh, everything is turned upside down in the blink of an eye.

All that is accumulated over the years. How come things ended up this way? Did this happen all of a sudden?

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday… Now are these days mere repetitions of each other just like their names are?

Dates are usually single file, straight ahead: First day of the month, second day, third day, fourth day, fifth day, sixth day, seventh day… Always altering.

It’s all very well but;

haven’t we lived through this all before?

Or, didn’t we!?

How will the weather be tomorrow? brings together seven positions adopting different approaches, modes of thought, and production practices. As reflections of the reality from which they have emerged, each work in the exhibition enters into dialogue with the other pieces surrounding it.

Newspapers, harbingers of the new day, constitute the subject matter of Future Tense (Aslı Çavuşoğlu). In a geography where journalists are unable to write, Future Tense instead assigns this job to fortune-telling journalists. Having assembled fifty oracles with different political opinions and identities, the newspaper brings news from the future in a manner that highlights polyphony. By taking the future to a point of absurdity, the work provokes us into questioning the present, emphasising that issues such as polarisation, exclusion of alternative perspectives, misinformation, censorship, and manipulation of the information are a central problem of NOW. Days (Ahmet Doğu İpek) documents the artist’s “state of inability” in the wake of 15th July 2016, and demonstrates how this condition of withdrawal turned into one of production. The work consists of black squares that appeared by constantly moving, without any mediating tools, a certain amount of black watercolour onto white cotton paper each and every day starting with 16th July 2016. The result of Ahmet repeating this action daily over the course of 157 days is a black diary that highlights the act of endurance.

A golden crown composed of a B52 bomber aircraft placed on thin wires accompanied by four fighter aircrafts hangs on the wall as an instrumental part of the performance Untitled (Mehtap Baydu). The artist, who is to welcome audiences during the opening of the exhibition with “aircrafts flying around her head” demonstrates her attitude towards the ruling one in a playful and sarcastic manner. Newspapers, days, and aircrafts are met by a group of books placed on shelves, dedicated to letters, numbers, punctuation, and other kinds of marks. Fresh Like the First Day (Özlem Günyol & Mustafa Kunt) pulls apart all of the elements comprising the constitution of the Republic of Turkey, separating it into fifty-three volumes, rendering the text open to new possible narrative constructions.

The constitution is followed by the video Low Pressure (Cengiz Tekin) bringing movement and rhythm to the forefront. In this video we see men pacing up and down among the iron bars of a prison construction site. Swaying in the wind like wheat stalks, the iron bars behave like the natural part of the landscape in question.The men pacing up and down between these phantom walls are a prediction of the future, rendering visible the people filling up prisons, more of which are constructed by the day. This issue of visibility and invisibility is given a whole new dimension with the video Thirty Four / Sî û Çar (Robozkê) (Ahmet Öğüt & Fino Blendax). The 2nd piece in the Reverb album produced by Ahmet Öğüt in collaboration with Fino Blendax, Sî û Çar (Robozkê) is a musical response given in 2015 to the artist’s 2008 video Things We Count. While watching Sî û Çar we witness a massive graveyard of war aircrafts in Arizona’s Sonoran Desert accompanied by a voice counting up to thirty-four in Kurdish. As these retired war aircrafts flow before our eyes one by one, the variety of geographic areas in which they might have been used – and images of Roboski in particular – are conjured up in our minds. Sî û Çar underscores uncertainties regarding the past, present, and future. Uncertainties are then overcome with the work Art Solidarity (Pınar Öğrenci), which become plans for the future. Art Solidarity is composed of dozens of real or fake letters of invitation, all nearly identical to one another, used by the artist, who was arrested during a peace march she attended in the early days of 2016, for which she was then prosecuted, in her attempts to go abroad during her two-year-long trial process. Art Solidarity re-presents the notion of solidarity in the form of an artist’s self-portrait.

Tomorrow: putting forth uncertainties, forecasts, predictions, suggestions, and plans. How will the weather be tomorrow?