Artist Çınar Eslek is presenting her newest collection of works delving into the issue of one versus many and the problem of image in her recent solo show at Pg Art Galleryin İstanbul’s Tophane neighborhood. In the show titled “Koyaanisqatsi,” which means “life out of control” or “unbalanced life” in the Native American Hopi language, a video featuring countless tree branches collected by the artist from streets best discusses one of the main ideas behind the show.
The visitor first sees one branch and another one is added a second later, and then another and this goes on until there are so many on top of each other that the scene turns into an abstract one. “I was very much interested in the question of what one individual turns into when she is part of a crowd. During the Gezi resistance days, I saw many cut off branches on the streets and I started to collect them. Then I shot this video in my studio. One branch expresses something, but my question was what do they represent when a mass of them come together? What happens when a big number of social units gather? It may look like chaos, but there is also an abstraction here. We still recognize them as branches, but they also stop being a branch in a way,” Eslek explains during an interview with Today’s Zaman.
The Gezi resistance was a breaking point according to the artist, and she thinks we are still experiencing the aftereffects. “There is an abstract situation that is expressing itself, just like in this video but we cannot grasp it. There is a way of expression there that is different from the one we are accustomed to, which is beyond itself. All these branches have their own inner dynamic, their own reality, and they are expressing this reality in their own way. When something is a mass, it gets very hard to express the situation of being a mass,” she further elaborates, adding that she views the current political and social situation in Turkey similar to this video.
“It’s a very abstract situation. There is a problem of expression, and that’s why we cannot produce anything. Nobody can say this and that is going to happen after the election. We used to have clear definitions and meaningful predictions or possibilities. Now we do not have them; there is a situation that is beyond all of us, and this is something we cannot grasp. There are many questions such as how we are going to understand all these and what will happen next,” she says.
Another work is a painting depicting the Tower of Babel, which is based on the famous mythical story told in the Old Testament. “We do not know whether this story is real or not. The image reaches, us but we cannot even question it. It has changed its meaning so many times in the past 5,000 years that the words we know about it do not reflect the image itself anymore. This is why I wanted to play with its image; it looks like the Tower of Babel, but it also gives the impression of a factory,” Eslek further comments.
“In all the works in the exhibition there are image losses. The images reach us, but they are abstracted from their original meanings all the way. They are flowing to us in such a way that we cannot even question this situation. Even now, when we are talking about them, we are talking about the stories of the images, not the images itself. That’s what left to us. There are thousands of images and we cannot know their real histories,” the artist points out. In a similar vein, another painting depicting a bison also reminds us of the paintings found in the Lascaux cave, and it is another example of images losing their initial meanings on the way to reaching us.
Also featuring the artist’s newest resin works, “Koyaanisqatsi” will run through Nov. 20 at PG Art Gallery.
