Collectors do not grow weary of the search: Interview
with Borga Kantürk
Özge Ersoy -2012
This interview was first published in the catalogue of the FULL Art Prize 2012
This interview was first published in the catalogue of the FULL Art Prize 2012
Borga
Kantürk, an artist whose practice is frequently based on diaristic responses to
and recordings of what he is exposed to, for me, represents a spontaneity, a
responsiveness, which situate the works in that particular transformation of
the familiar. In other words, I’m drawn to how Borga alters what I know by
employing different media and methodologies. In this conversation with Özge,
the two trace Borga’s interests, curiosities, and references through looking at
Borga’s work within the framework of his exhibitions and projects, varying in
space and scope, with an emphasis on the conceptual and visual
connections.—Merve Ünsal
.
Özge Ersoy: Borga, I’d like to start with a
question about your drawings. In your recent works, you depart from photos,
digital visuals, and newspaper clippings that you have found and collected. At
the center of the installation The Other Zidane are your drawings about
the soccer player Djemal Zidane, who played in the Algerian National Team in
the 1980s. For Close Ranks (2009-2011) you drew players, uniforms, and
banners that reflect the resistance and struggle documented on the fields and
grandstands. In Jot this Down Too (2012), you portrayed Hrant Dink in
red, Lefter Küçükandonyadis in blue, and used black for Festus Okey, who was
murdered with a shot in the neck at the Beyoğlu Police Station. It is possible
to say that you intervened with and recreated, thus personalized these
documents you collected for these works. On the one hand, you seem to
acknowledge these figures who are the subject of your drawings. On the
other hand, you might be creating your own unique expression by opting for
manual and slow production. Could you talk about the relationship you’ve
established with your drawings? Does this relation differ among the aforementioned
works?
Borga
Kantürk: For me, to
draw is to feel an affinity with the person or event I’m addressing, to have
empathy towards them. I started to produce with this rationale in 2008. I must
say that the fact my practice sways between being a curator and an artist is
closely related to this mode of production. On the one hand, I am motivated by
the operative practice of curatorship to conduct research on oral history and
undocumented phenomena and create an archive. On the other hand, through my identity
as an artist, I am interested in conveying this archive to the audience by
assuming the role of a witness or narrator. What I want to do as an artist is
to tackle the situations and processes that I feel close to and to blur their
boundaries. I think pen and paper are the most simple and humane tools of
keeping a record. I can say that instead of being a writer who takes notes,
records and interprets things, I prefer documenting via drawings.
I’ve had
this fixation with documenting since 2001–2002. Earlier, I used to reproduce my
own documents; by painting, drawing or penciling over them. I started this
process by manually documenting the banner of one of my exhibits. Later I
decided to use carbon paper. I was interested in leaving a trace while being unable
to see the transformation of the original. I produced diaries with this
rationale. These days I’m pondering over how these traces relate to the status
quo, the state and the wheels of bureaucracy. How is historical memory
recorded, how does it get lost or left unrecorded? Carbon paper is a symbol of
the status quo. The colors red, blue and black also take on a significance
here. I’m interested in how these three colors—that are used in government
offices—are representative of the official space and ideology; they relate to
pens, stamp-seals, and carbon paper.
ÖE: By employing the drawing technique
you are also questioning the idea of authorship. It seems as though you are
concerned with resisting the urge to produce a brand new creation; you’re
attempting to establish more subtle, intellectual links.
BK: My ideas on drawing were shaped at
the Helsinki Artist Residency Program I participated in 2005. In that period I
was drawing every day. My drawings thus transformed into an action, into a
series of traces. I was trying to emphasize the process, the whole that progressed
day by day. For me, it is also an interrogation into the idea of belonging.
However, the sense of producing a singular and unique creation is not a matter
in question here. It is closer in stand to On Kawara’s works which mark the
actual day that is lived and gone.
Borges has
an anthology/archive titled The Library of Babel. This project compiles
a selection of short stories, and in a sense, signifies Borges, expresses his
view. Actually we already know most of the stories included in this book. There
is Poe, Melville… What I find exciting here is the question of why Borges
wanted to create this route, this state of togetherness, and present it to us
as such a whole. Here there is the guidance of someone who makes and interprets
signs and follows the traces. This is a dedicated effort to transform all these
little narratives from different times into a series within a certain time
frame and space. Based on this, I am constructing for myself the model of an
artist who edits, compiles, archives, bears witness, preserves, saves and
shares that which s/he has saved.
ÖE: You often place your drawings in a
space. The drawings in The Other Zidane (Revenge of Zidane) are
exhibited on custom-made wallpaper, before the plastic chairs you painted in
red, green, and white. In Close Ranks, the arrangement of the drawings
is reminiscent of the form of the sun; and in previous installations they
appear together with a neon sign that reads “um coracao, um corpo, um sol” (one
heart, one body, one sun)—in reference to the Brazilian soccer player Socrates.
In other words, instead of exhibiting the drawings on their own, you construct
them as parts of installations. Could you talk about how you construct this
relationship? By creating this connection, do you emphasize your personal
relationship to documents?
BK: My concern is to create an
atmosphere. The exhibition space is ultimately a living area. Especially if you
are including the exterior space in this construction, in this work… In any
case one can’t deny that this exterior is a space with memory, the public
nature of which is experienced beyond one’s intervention. The notion of
creating a private sphere like a room or atmosphere is inherent in works
intended as books or diaries as well. The book is a process with a beginning
and end, there is a volume suffused by this process; the structure is shaped
accordingly. The book’s relation to that which is public starts to be shaped in
the café or the library where it contacts the public. These drawings are
sometimes construed to become a book and sometimes as a spatial installation.
Here, I can
also refer to my curatorial works. The KUTU Portable Art Gallery that I started
in 2002 was also concerned with creating a space of its own and later adapting
that area to another space. My desire was to exhibit artworks inside, to create
a safe space, a designated area for the artist’s works and expressions, and
therefore to provide a sort of isolation. As for the artist, KUTU was based on
a notion like creating “a room of one’s own.”
Also in my
installations I feel the need to create a buffer zone with meticulously drawn
and marked boundaries—similar to a stage or a section in a museum. In such a
structure, these productions have a documentary nature and are also subjected
to personal intervention; they exist in so far as they point to an event or a
situation, either on their own or as depicted in newspapers. Let’s consider an
archive or a corpus: They are more distant to being pieces of a whole; they are
dissociated and singular. They have been detached from the temporal sequence;
they have transformed from a single historical reality into a kind of
reminiscence, a remembrance that recalls ambiguity. I prefer the presentation
of these productions within a unifying atmosphere. The curatorial and editorial
aspect of the work becomes effectual at this point.
ÖE: Let’s go back to your urge to
collect and archive. Considering the scope and sobriety of your research, one
can say that you use a documentary approach. Despite your meticulous archiving
that resembles that of a social scientist, the fact that you refrain from
didacticism is quite apparent. How does your relationship with documents alter
in different stages of the collection process? When do you decide to take a
break from collecting and intervene? What aspects are most crucial for you to
emphasize in your intervention?
BK: In my work, I emphasize the
process. Thus, scattered and multipartite constructs may emerge out of my
works. I’ve been interested in the notion of collecting since childhood. I’ve
collected various objects at different times, like sticker books, tapes, music
albums, and exhibition invites. I want to highlight the way in which these
objects relate to memory and the ever-changing process of collecting. I start
to work on the transformation of this process into constructs to be exhibited
only when the state of collecting and research exhausts me and I’m crammed with
the objects and documents I’ve found. I can liken this state to that of the
crammed secondhand stores where objects lose their visibility. It is when my
mind, hard disk, and desk reach the point of overflowing that I want to stop
collecting, reduce the articles and intervene. Collectors do not grow weary of
the search; they cannot help but orient their instincts towards what they want
to find and get covered up in dust as they do so. I also have moments when I
say “OK, it’s done” or “come on, that’s it, we are doing the exhibition.” Thus
I can’t say that I’m exhibiting a completed transmission, artwork or visual
product. My priority lies with emphasizing the research process and presenting
various records and interpretations driven from it. I’m perhaps playing with it
because I’m bored with the dry and absolute state of a historical document
devoid of a story.
ÖE: Here I recall your collection of
visual materials on the state of traveling. Your work titled Travel Log
(2011) combines the photos you took in İzmir with the associative texts of a
writer who used to live in this city. Your “Café Recordis”(2011) exhibition
held in Gallery NON makes reference to ships and sea shores while dealing
with the actions of waiting and wandering. Both works make me think of the
links between environmental and personal transformations. How do the concepts
of belonging, reminiscence, nostalgia, and the state of traveling link to one
another in these works for you?
BK: This is a state of restless
wandering. I associate it with certain examples in literature. Upon Fatih
Özgüven’s advice I started reading Antonio Tabucchi; and I can say that the
spiritual and physical state of wandering that I’ve read there has a connection
with my works. Just like in Melih Cevdet Anday’s poem “The Disturbed Tree” or
in İlhan Berk’s “Yesterday I Took to the Hills, I Was Not Home”, I am
questioning the act of setting off on the road with a heavy heart caught
between dreams and reality. As one wanders, history and time continue their
flow; and one continues to bear witness. It is also possible to read this
condition as a sociological excavation or mental archeology. A social and
ideological comparison between the past and current events reinforces this state
of chagrin. I feel increasingly anachronistic, as if I live in the wrong age or
I am the wrong person; that I’ve been unable to keep up with the social, urban,
and many other transformations; that I’ve been cut off from communication and
have become restless as a result. My works thus emerge as the product of such a
mind-state.
ÖE: Finally let’s touch upon your
recent exhibition titled “The Sick and the Building” (2012). This time you
approach personal transformations from a different angle; memory and nostalgia
are replaced with uniformity, apathy, and timelessness. Do you think you look
at the relationship between the individual and the space in a different way?
BK: My previous exhibition “Café
Recordis” coincided with my return from military service; it emerged as the
reflection of a mind-state focused on wandering with the past and memory,
motion as well as emancipation. It was a retrospective journey into a spiritual
past and also a journey showing that I can pace, that I can move. There were
interspaces like the harbor, the seashore, and the street.
“The Sick
and the Building” is more about returning after a bit of wandering and closure.
It focuses specifically on the concept of time and processes whereby the
relationship between time and human spirit gets interwoven with the workings of
bureaucracy and public buildings. I am interested in the conflict between
institutional time that seems almost static, and personal time buried in
routine going on for years on end as if it has no end or no beginning, and then
just wasting away. This is also related to the sense of living over and over
again (like it was just yesterday), having lost the knowledge of which day you
started doing the same things. This exhibition can also be viewed as a
self-portrait; because it looks at the space and the person within that space.
It throws a wink at literature and cinema dealing with such themes of haunted
houses and labyrinths, while at the same time playing with links between
modernity and institutionalization. Here is a more condensed and gloomy state
of entanglement. I think this exhibition is focused on the idea of wandering in
a place with its perimeters woven in a systematic web and where the slow flow
of time is killed; and putting up resistance by looking for a way out.
Borga
Kantürk is an artist based in Izmir. He holds a graduate degree and proficiency
in art from the Department of Painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts at Dokuz
Eylül University. Borga participated in artist residency programs at La Friche,
Sextant Et Plus, Marseille, France (2009) and HIAP (Helsinki International
Artist-in-Residence Programme), Helsinki, Finland (2005). His most recent solo
shows include “The Sick and the Building,” Galeri NON, Istanbul (2012), “Cafe
Recordis,” Galeri NON, Istanbul (2011), and “Tanıklık Mesafesi,” Institut
Française Exhibition Hall, Izmir (2009). He is one of the co-founders of K2
artist’s initiative (2003-2007) and “KUTU” Mobile Art Space (2002-2009).
