Records of Breath is an installation that centers upon sounds of breath extracted from a recorded session with a psychologist. During the session, the psychologist walks the artist through experience of collective trauma & public mourning, arriving at personal loss and individual grief. The conversation is recorded with consent. And then the spoken words are cut out. We are left with sounds of breath.
The session which deepened with psychologist Seda Günel’s questions took place on Monday, 14th of March, 2016. In the aftermath of 2015 Suruç and 2015 Ankara bombings, watercolor diaries were kept between January – March 2016 in Mardin, Dargeçit, Diyarbakır, Ümraniye, Burgazada. On this page, selected pages from these watercolor diaries accompany the extracted sounds of inhales and exhales of breath. Triggered by states of violence, loss and mourning, this intervention is an invitation for another way of listening to the untold.
STATEMENT
“Discovering forms of relating” defines my artistic practice. I am intrigued by the fantastic that is inherent in daily and seemingly unimportant encounters. The shifts between the unimportant, the poetic and the political aspects of daily situations inform my work. I make use of documentary techniques like interviews, visual and sound recordings as well as tracings, molds and casts in documenting selected situations. Taking off from facts, my work arrives at a half-documentary approach where the gap between fact and fiction reveals what may have been overlooked. The focus of my artistic engagement is studying the nature of gaps. I make use of the visible to explore the invisible. Exploring situations that do not recognize the limits that politics enforce, I work with memory of things forcefully lost. Driven by intuition, the multiple layers of my work bridge the witness to the dreamer. I work with large scale installations (including sculpture, sound, performance, animations and drawing) in a situation-specific and material-sensitive manner.