The object that wears the gaze
The body is what I am and what is mine. Its presence is unique in me, and this prevents me from knowing the experience of other bodies. In this way, the experience of embodied being becomes a series of familiar yet alien experiences in an overwhelming variety. Within this multiplicity of experiences, the body touches the earth with all its perception.
In this exhibition, Berk Kır brings the body's contact with the objects of the sensible world into the viewer's experience through seeing, hearing, and touching. The artist conveys what happens between bodies and objects within the act of taking photographs, which he has been practicing for a long time, through his ongoing photography series “You Have a Place Above My Head".
Bodies posing with found objects in the city show the bond between the object and the human being that constructs/fictionalizes identity on the level of genders. On the other hand, the use of the phrase "You Have a Place Above My Head", which we often use in current language to make others feel valued, in the title of this photo series leaks tolerance through the object body and gendered identities.
Furthermore, in this series, Berk experiments with new existences by placing the object, which is identified with household objects and women/gender, on other bodies on the street. It is precisely here that the exhibition comes into contact with being object. Berk invites the viewer with his own voice from the façade of the venue and compares them with the blocking/covering/enclosing trapezoidal sheet metal material he has detached from the city, accompanied by his photographs. On the ground, standing, leaning against the wall, leaning against each other, these new urban furnishings are integrated with Berk's photography series "You Have a Place Above My Head".
The images occupying the corrugated bodies wear a new gaze, and this gaze takes on an existential meaning where the object touches the object. Accepting an attitude, he knows from the street with all his consciousness, urban objects turn into a becoming with this acceptance. Berk adds sound to this intimacy. The sounds that can only be heard in the exhibition through headsets are, in Berk's words, "companions to each other in the possibility that photography can turn into its own object."
The sounds that cannot be heard at first glance, specific to each object, are the frequencies that can be heard by scanning the surfaces of the photographs and the temperature values of the heat emitted by the colors on the images. Berk tries to combine singular perceptions such as seeing, hearing, and touching in a field of multiple experiences while transforming photograph into object and object into sound. Again, in his own words; he creates the inaudible against the invisible. These two actions, both in themselves and as metaphors, accompany the transformation of photography into an object within the conceptual framework of the exhibition, multiplying the vocalization of queer thought. It opens up the blurred existence within the increasingly sharpened power of being gendered, and the sound of queer being, which is marginalized and even punished, coming closer to the outside.
French philosopher Jacques Lacan's concept of "extimacy", from which the exhibition takes its name, is a concept that blurs the boundaries between the "internal" and the "external" and states that the external is inherent to the internal. Lacan is a psychoanalyst who questions the distinction between "inside" and "outside" in order to understand the inner world and the self. In traditional psychoanalysis, "intimacy" is usually considered a personal and internal process, whereas Lacan's concept of "extimacy" emphasizes what lies outside personal boundaries and somehow belongs to our inner world. The exterior takes over the interior and establishes identity. The objects that Berk encounters also touch upon a possession. For example, while he approaches home with the iron and teapot, he gets closer to the city with the trapezoidal sheet metal. The outside and the inside start talking here. Has the inside invaded the outside? Has the outside infiltrated the inside? This can turn into an ambiguous conversation. At first glance, the uncanny city and the safe house! Is it really what it seems? The private/public distinction becomes ambiguous, creating an in-between situation. Sound turns into image, image into sound. While Lacan's concept of "extimacy" wanders between the self and the other, the outside and the intimate, the home and the city, "intimacy outside" turns into a contact full of irony in this exhibition.
In this exhibition, Berk Kır, again in his own words, thinks about and makes connections with Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of embodiment, Gilles Deleuze's idea of forces, Graham Harman's object-oriented ontology and Timothy Morton's objects and causality. As we come to the end of the article, I would like to mention Merleau-Ponty, with whom Berk makes a strong connection, and whom I have been working on for years and often cite. For in his philosophy, the body is an object in action. The body as a field of experience, the "I in the world", is about the existence of the body as subject and object and how it is an object among all other things and at the same time "I". The body is not an ordinary object among all other objects. The body resolves everything else through itself: Colors, sounds, bodies, and objects find all their meaning in it. Like the bark of a cone, which is made up of interwoven layers, perception takes place in the body and at an intersection with the body, whose subject and object are the same, in a braided structure like the layers of a cone. The body that is me is an object that carries all values, where what I perceive is made in me and becomes me, or where I become what I perceive. The subject body expresses itself and the world of objects without any intermediary. Merleau-Ponty describes the seeing body as follows: My body is both the seer and the visible. It looks at everything, it can look at itself, and then, when it sees, it can recognize the "other side" of its own power of sight. It sees itself as that which sees; it touches itself as that which touches itself, it is visible and sensible for itself... (2)
The fact that the subject body knows how to experience being perceived and perceiving as an object and being an object itself within the self-established by the body creates intimacy outside itself. However, in actual life, its striving for superiority over other living beings, its conspecifics and things detaches it from nature. In this rupture, the exhibition attempts to reconnect the body, the city, the house, the objects in an existential narrative between image and sound; without forgetting the power of photography to clothe time with the image.
Nazlı Pektaş
(1) Pektaş, N. (2013). ÇAĞDAŞ SANATTA BEDEN ALGISI "1960 Sonrası Bedene Merleau-Ponty ile Bakmak”, Unpublished Thesis for Proficiency in Art, Marmara University Institute of Fine Arts, Department of Painting, Istanbul.
(2) Maurice Merleau-Ponty, L’Ceil Et I’Esprit, Metis Publications, 2003, s.33-34.