Freaky Fringe Fascinated Fearsome Fabricated Forgotten Foretelling FINGERS
THIS IS NOT US,
THIS IS WHAT REMAINED FROM US
A Mixer Exhibition by
Ali Şentürk
(5 September – 12 October)
This month in art, I would like to review a strong exhibition by multi-disciplinary artist Ali Şentürk which opened up the new season for me, affecting me deeply, to the extent that it actually sometimes felt like a punch to the stomach through delicately composed hands formed by mystical fingers.
Paintings, installations, sculptures and video-art are exhibited in “This Is Not Us, This Is What Remained From Us”, where the works are not strongly related with each other as they portray the various aspects of the problematic; the hands.
The anatomic beauty and mystery of hands have interested many artists throughout history, not least Ali Şentürk. However, in Şentürk’s works, all hands are cut from the body and seem to live on their own as a different kind of species, and mostly seem incomplete. Talented fingers that are broken, left behind and somehow survived or kept themselves from disappearing. Şentürk embraces a variety of disciplines and styles within a single exhibition. His thin and elegant lines in the paintings are illustrative and his sculptures have post-modern and an experimental flavor. The lines, hands, fingers and creatures in the exhibition seem to try keeping a straight line but fail aesthetically. Maybe just to start all over again, they exist in repetition and form striking visualizations of the modern human-unbalanced.
I believe vulnerability, absence, delicacy, fear and warm human needs are portrayed in bizarre aesthetics and as complex phenomena. Where some works might be considered queer or feminist, others are existential and some even mystical. For example, the finger creature-like sculpture, which the exhibition takes its name from, seems to have no gender. Maybe it is a non-binary, surreal queer creature? Perhaps named Po? Though I am certain that Po is a contemporary individual, probably having some existential crisis and walks around with its fingery feet, analyses our weird society and creates its own art. And Po likes to hang around.
Another queer work is a painting where there are lesbian figures without erotic implications. The two woman figures assist and help each other stay standing, with their legs and heads entwined. Maybe they hold a strong bond, a romantic relationship entwined with solidarity.
My favorite piece though, was the video art titled “video-loop,1’42” in which there are two hands, a woman’s and a man’s, reaching towards each other in slow motion and the woman’s hand pulls out something like an old skin piece from the palm of the man’s hand, like a snake changing its skin. The video ends and starts all over again – reaching. The first thought that came to my mind was that, in order to caress and love one another tenderly, the old skin must be removed, delicately. Maybe, there is a performative reading on modern relationships especially, the first intimate touches between two people. A traumatic past comes to being as an extra and old skin which keeps the palm to touch/love softly as it is hard and dry. It is like the defense mechanisms which we all have and that have become extremely strong facets of our social masks. Despite the dramatic atmosphere and the anxiety activated in me, I cannot help but feel the hope dripping from it.
The piece is controversial yet wholesome. The pain and the healing that is so fragile opens up a novel way of perceiving intimacy and a softer way of dealing with traumatic relics. I believe everyone can easily recognize this, even if they have never experienced it. Şentürk produces an authentic transcendence through the totality of the exhibition which reminded me of one of Rumi’s passages in which he too used the metaphor of the hands. Such as in the following:
“Your hand opens and closes, opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralyzed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as birds’ wings.”
Perhaps, extending a sincere hand is what we all can give and receive if we let and let go to the flow – balanced.
All in all, I strongly recommend you give yourself a chance to experience and interact with Şentürk’s freaky, fringe, fascinating, fearsome, fabricated, forgotten, foretelling FINGERS and perhaps form another word to define them for yourselves and take it to the country of your hands… home…
Images courtesy of the artist. The official event page can be found here.
