a documentation by antenna from the "munferit" exhibition
24 Ocak 2008 Perşembe
15 Ocak 2008 Salı
An Isolated Event
Human beings are forgetful but at the same time have the faculty of remembering. What they forget and what they remember is directly related to the time they live in and the context they belong to. So in a sense, memory is an entirely ideological/political field of investment. A phenomenon related to what you want to bring from your past to the present. Memory is always the memory of pain, the well of pain. The things, events people cannot forget depend on what has made itself a place at the threshold of pain. The effort to care for another’s pain and to share it is shaped with the decisions and preferences we make in our daily life. We were confronted with the question of what we should keep in our memory in the most painful manner in the aftermath of the murder of Hrant Dink. This murder which brought hundreds of thousands of people to their feet in protest –as the experiences in our memory stand witness- was not an isolated murder. It had a genealogy which could be said to go back tens of years. There was a gigantic history we had left behind, shaped around the description ‘isolated’.
The past, but which past? Memory, but which memory? The collective memory is formed only once the concept of collectivity is defined. Since each social group or class founds itself on a past and an origin, each social section will retain the past where its own pain is hidden and constantly update it. Therefore, collective memory is about the context we include ourselves in; it can be transformed into a field open to distortion. After all, collective memory can be suspended under the audio-visual bombardment of the imagination carried out by media, linked to the powers that be. Therefore, the human being of our time, who has become a master and captive of forgetting in the name of waking up problem-free the next morning, has a problem with memory. S/he remembers but is not sure: or s/he remembers like that.
The group, which formed under the name January 19 Collective in reference to the date we lost Hrant, sensed the demands of a past whose voice had been suppressed, and worked for months, from within a darkened history, against a universe of trouble which dimmed the day and drew the hope out of the future, with an effort to expand the field of intersection between art, the political field, memory and history and to render artificial discriminations invalid. Our work formed around a past of 25-30 years. And the common source of pain was just about evident. People are becoming the target of a type of violence which comes from different sources in all corners of the country, but is shaped around the same logic. A chain of deaths, murders or forced disappearances is used as a means of keeping society under control by violence, all described as “isolated” cases. The force that has accumulated as January 19 believes that the present has been darkened enough (do not forget the efforts to cover up evidence) and that the truth, constantly relegated to the designation of being “isolated,” must be opened to discussion.
Beginning with the murder, in the last 27 years of Turkey’s history, i.e., since the September 12 military coup, isolated has been a clichéd expression often called upon by the authorized mouthpieces of the state to manipulate. The word expresses an event/state which one only rarely comes across, and goes on to explain devastating events as individual deviances, covers up the history of political murders, tries to dilute the reaction and closes the door in the face of structural explanations. Unearthing the genealogy of events packaged as isolated cases can of course be taken up in another project which would require serious labour. The aim of our work, which is of a modest scale, is to keep remembering the murders; almost all of which can be described as unresolved assassinations, the murderers of which continue to live among us and to bring to the present day the precursors of the attack on Hrant Dink which aimed to end his life, and to reveal, in all its nakedness, the fact that this murder was neither coincidental nor isolated… To tell the political mind and fear which prepares the murders, whose perpetrators cannot be found, and even when they are, whose extensions at the source cannot be reached and always remain unknown, to stop. To shed light on them, from the present towards the past, on a pitch black memory with white letters and to show that they come out of machines of violence which are related to each other and form a network. The discourse of hatred and the culture of lynching, both spreading and growing, are taking over daily life as the legitimized support for fascistic attacks. This formation, approved by some as a ‘natural and democratic’ reaction, clears the way for street fascism exemplified in the Hrant Dink murder and other murders of hatred which took place in the aftermath. This discourse has today boiled over and stretched beyond the border and the drums of war resound louder every day. Therefore, instead of saying that the development process of this discourse will dissolve in time and waiting, we have to aim at the present, with the thought that all conscientious people have a responsibility to bear, and at one point, stop time flowing on like this. Because we are surrounded by enough hatred and animosity.
The violence applied to sections of society which cannot enter the main and holy body of power and are constantly excluded, the Kurds, Armenians, Greeks, Jews, transvestites, gays, lesbians, the unemployed, the immigrants, the asylum seekers, the Africans or just anyone; and all murders left unresolved, as a result of the violence applied by a variety of political organizations which form micro mechanisms of power, have been treated at an equal distance within the framework of this event. We find it important to react to violence aimed at civil life wherever it comes from. What is important is to stay stop! and react to this violence wherever it may come from.
With this event, the contemporary artists and writers who form the January 19 Collective, which has been meeting regularly for a year, meticulously investigated the records of these past murders which have been covered up, and faced their own personal memories. We refrained from turning the event into a rigid memorial exhibition. The act of commemoration was imagined as a stance, an action. Today, contemporary art is being refined as a cultural field to decorate Turkey’s shop window facing the outside world. We want to reiterate that the radical intervention of contemporary art to the present and the social is still possible.
The January 19 Collective
The past, but which past? Memory, but which memory? The collective memory is formed only once the concept of collectivity is defined. Since each social group or class founds itself on a past and an origin, each social section will retain the past where its own pain is hidden and constantly update it. Therefore, collective memory is about the context we include ourselves in; it can be transformed into a field open to distortion. After all, collective memory can be suspended under the audio-visual bombardment of the imagination carried out by media, linked to the powers that be. Therefore, the human being of our time, who has become a master and captive of forgetting in the name of waking up problem-free the next morning, has a problem with memory. S/he remembers but is not sure: or s/he remembers like that.
The group, which formed under the name January 19 Collective in reference to the date we lost Hrant, sensed the demands of a past whose voice had been suppressed, and worked for months, from within a darkened history, against a universe of trouble which dimmed the day and drew the hope out of the future, with an effort to expand the field of intersection between art, the political field, memory and history and to render artificial discriminations invalid. Our work formed around a past of 25-30 years. And the common source of pain was just about evident. People are becoming the target of a type of violence which comes from different sources in all corners of the country, but is shaped around the same logic. A chain of deaths, murders or forced disappearances is used as a means of keeping society under control by violence, all described as “isolated” cases. The force that has accumulated as January 19 believes that the present has been darkened enough (do not forget the efforts to cover up evidence) and that the truth, constantly relegated to the designation of being “isolated,” must be opened to discussion.
Beginning with the murder, in the last 27 years of Turkey’s history, i.e., since the September 12 military coup, isolated has been a clichéd expression often called upon by the authorized mouthpieces of the state to manipulate. The word expresses an event/state which one only rarely comes across, and goes on to explain devastating events as individual deviances, covers up the history of political murders, tries to dilute the reaction and closes the door in the face of structural explanations. Unearthing the genealogy of events packaged as isolated cases can of course be taken up in another project which would require serious labour. The aim of our work, which is of a modest scale, is to keep remembering the murders; almost all of which can be described as unresolved assassinations, the murderers of which continue to live among us and to bring to the present day the precursors of the attack on Hrant Dink which aimed to end his life, and to reveal, in all its nakedness, the fact that this murder was neither coincidental nor isolated… To tell the political mind and fear which prepares the murders, whose perpetrators cannot be found, and even when they are, whose extensions at the source cannot be reached and always remain unknown, to stop. To shed light on them, from the present towards the past, on a pitch black memory with white letters and to show that they come out of machines of violence which are related to each other and form a network. The discourse of hatred and the culture of lynching, both spreading and growing, are taking over daily life as the legitimized support for fascistic attacks. This formation, approved by some as a ‘natural and democratic’ reaction, clears the way for street fascism exemplified in the Hrant Dink murder and other murders of hatred which took place in the aftermath. This discourse has today boiled over and stretched beyond the border and the drums of war resound louder every day. Therefore, instead of saying that the development process of this discourse will dissolve in time and waiting, we have to aim at the present, with the thought that all conscientious people have a responsibility to bear, and at one point, stop time flowing on like this. Because we are surrounded by enough hatred and animosity.
The violence applied to sections of society which cannot enter the main and holy body of power and are constantly excluded, the Kurds, Armenians, Greeks, Jews, transvestites, gays, lesbians, the unemployed, the immigrants, the asylum seekers, the Africans or just anyone; and all murders left unresolved, as a result of the violence applied by a variety of political organizations which form micro mechanisms of power, have been treated at an equal distance within the framework of this event. We find it important to react to violence aimed at civil life wherever it comes from. What is important is to stay stop! and react to this violence wherever it may come from.
With this event, the contemporary artists and writers who form the January 19 Collective, which has been meeting regularly for a year, meticulously investigated the records of these past murders which have been covered up, and faced their own personal memories. We refrained from turning the event into a rigid memorial exhibition. The act of commemoration was imagined as a stance, an action. Today, contemporary art is being refined as a cultural field to decorate Turkey’s shop window facing the outside world. We want to reiterate that the radical intervention of contemporary art to the present and the social is still possible.
The January 19 Collective
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