What gets lost in a translation? What can we learn from unsaid things?
And how is that silenced shaped? What do forgotten words, books, libraries and archives still tell us? Can we liberate ourselves from assumptions and pose questions instead?
Inez Piso is a curator and translator who graduated with a bachelor's degree in Art History from the University of Amsterdam and a Master’s degree from the Universidad Autónoma Madrid. After working four years in the CA2M, Madrid, she moved to Istanbul where she participated in the IKSV Research Programme with the HüzünProject in 2018. She worked for After the Archive? an initiative that gains attention to silenced archives and questions the role of archives in the creation of public memory in Turkey. She likes to curate exhibitions in unexpected spaces, like an archival box that once belonged to Ulises Carrión: No Todo ~ Niet Alles or the public ferry that crosses the waters of Amsterdam for the Amsterdam Ferry Festival. At the end of 2021 she became the artistic director of HMK: an exhibition space an artist-in-residence programme located in a 17th century chapel.
She is teaches for the MA programme F for Fact at the Sandberg Institute and the Language and Image Department at the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. She is also a teacher at the Fine Arts Bachelor programme at Minerva Art Academy in Groningen. Although her practice is about things that cannot be said with words, she sometimes writes for art magazines like Mister Motley. She is continuously bridging cultural and geographical spaces with her interests in language and translation.
Okay Özkan
Daydreaming, 2018
Daydreaming is an installation made out of a composition of office material that fully covers one of the larger desks in the Tuna Ofis building. Okay Özkan first started making these playful objects by combining pencils, erasers and sharpeners when he was still in primary school. He imagined the objects could represent tanks, but actually they could be anything: weird cars or different animals. The work is an exercise to disconnect from the intended design and singular function linked to the object. The employees at the office are invited to a workshop by Okay Özkan, that aims at sharing this experience of daydreaming.
This workshop is done during official working hours and in that sense steals some time in order to be unproductive and let the imagination run wild beyond the functionality of the daily objects that surround us.
The breath, 2014
When the artist studied history of modern art in Turkey, he learned about the Calder sculptures and would imagine how they would move beyond the static depiction in his books. The first time he encountered one of these moving sculptures in a museum in Western Europe, he was disappointed to see the sculpture wasn’t moving at all. The attempt of being modern as a museum, as part of a modern identity of a city, felt fake to the artist and he decided to make a small critique on this pretension by simply blowing his breath in the direction of the sculpture. Eventually he made the sculpture move by blowing his breath into the modern forms.
The choice to leave the documentation of this small performance of resistance in black and white, underlines the problem of modern aesthetics that become dated very fast. The design of the office is a continuous attempt to update the visual elements in a modern vision. But the modern is also constantly outdated, and turns into a conditioned space where even movement is impeded.
Okay Özkan
Daydreaming, 2018
Daydreaming, Tuna Ofis’te yer alan en geniş masalardan bir tanesinde yer alan ve kırtasiye malzemelerinden oluşan bir çalışma. Çalışmayı oluşturan kırtasiye malzemelerinin kullanım alanı ise okul sıralarından ofis masalarına kadar geniş bir yelpaze içerisinde yer almakta. Özkan’ın bu malzemelerle olan süreci ilkokul sıralarına kadar dayanır. İlk olarak bu nesnelerle tank ve benzeri militarist formlar yaratan Özkan, sonrasında aynı nesnelerin daha farklı formlara dönüşebileceğini fark ederek çalışmayı başka bir boyuta taşır.
Daydreaming’de yer alan nesneler günlük bağlamından koparılarak onlara ithaf edilenin dışındaki yerlere konumlanıyor. Çalışmanın workshop kısmında ofis çalışanları Özkan tarafından bu deneyimi paylaşmaya davet ediliyor. Ofis çalışanlarının mesai saatleri içinde gerçekleşecek workshop, nesneleri günlük bağlamından kopardığı gibi çalışanları da mesai saatlerinden kopartarak ve ofisin çalışma saatlerini aksatarak sekteye uğratıyor.
The breath, 2014
Nefes, 2014 Sanatçı, Türkiye’deki eğitimi sırasında modern sanat üzerine olan derslerde Calder’in mobil heykelleriyle tanışır; kitaplarda ve benzeri kaynaklarda hareketsiz halini gördüğü heykelleri hareketli olarak hayal eder. İlk defa Batı Avrupa’daki bir müzede bu mobil heykellerden bir tanesi ile karşılaştığında heykelin hareketsiz bir biçimde tavanda asılı olduğunu görmek Özkan’ı hayal kırıklığına uğratır. Bir müze olarak, şehrin kimliğinin bir parçası olarak modern olma girişimi sanatçıya gerçek dışı görünür ve Özkan bu sav üzerine, sadece nefesiyle üfleyerek, bir eleştiri getirmeye karar verir. Nihayetinde bu modern biçime üfleyerek nefesiyle onu hareket ettirir.
Bu küçük performatif direnişin siyah beyaz olarak belgelenmesi çok hızlı eskiyen modern estetik probleminin altını çiziyor. Genel olarak “ofis tasarımı” modern bir vizyon üzerinden görsel elementlerin güncellenmesiyle süregelen bir girişimdir. Fakat aynı zamanda “modern” çağdışı ve hareketin engellendiği şartlandırılmış bir alana dönüşür.