AH OH
curated by ğ
June 8 – July 17, 2010
Artists: Hasan Aksaygın, Sevim Burak & Elfe Uluç, Patty Chang, iç-mihrak, Oktay İnce (from Karahaber Video Collective), Aykan Safoğlu, Rinus Van de Velde, Ming Wong
curated by 
Indicating the binding power of treaties, the Latin phrase Pacta Sunt Servanda* (“Agreements must be kept” or “Contracts must be honored”) provides a discussion ground for the exhibition AH OH that aims to interrogate contemporary forms of social constructions such as promises, loyalty, faith, family, privacy, sexuality and morality. As an exhibition, AH OH brings together a selection of art works that deal with the politics of love, rituals of pleasure, crises of morality as well as the psychoanalytic dynamics of human existence. AH OH seeks to confront visitors with the impossibility of keeping promises, but also the indispensability of having them in our social and moral contracts. On a personal level, the exhibition asks the critical question: “When do we promise, and when do we break promises into pieces in order to reconstruct ourselves?”
The Exhibition AH OH welcomes its audience with a charcoal drawing by Rinus Van de Velde, a Belgian artist hot on the rise. Borrowing his content from a second hand image, the artist abstracts a situational analysis, giving rise to a tension of class conflict; raising an age old question reproduced by our relationship with our pets and social situations arising from these relations… Who is the master, who is the slave?
The next step brings fictional posters responding to the policies of sexual discrimination by iç-mihrak, an art collective that believes in the transformantion of public conscience and operates with a strategy based on anonymisation. Triggering the tension between the rulers and the ruled -marking the rituals of desire- these posters fill the city streets and grow into the walls of the exhibition space. The documentary titled “No call from Devrim” by Oktay İnce from Karahaber Video-Action Workshop, consist of interviews on homophobia held with lgbt, witnesses poeople and organisations. **What gives momentum to the film is Devrim’s faith in the Revolution.
The mural painting created in the exhibition space by the Cypriot artist Hasan Aksaygın conceptualizes the story of the cith of Varosha, whish has been evacuated and turned into a ghost town; as a portrait of the artist’s family and through the use of Byzantine references. Fictionalizing the artist as a figure left between his mother and father, the painting is much like a decryption of family ties; lighthearted and sorrowful. The conceptual ground of the exhibition borrows its local reference from the novel “Ford Mach I” by the legendary Turkish author Sevim Burak; as her daughter Elfe Uluç reinterprets the drawings she had made for the book (instructed by her mother as part of the writing process) and questions the connectivity of their literary relationship, in terms of making and keeping promises. In his video titled ” Angst Essen / Eat Fear”, the artist Ming Wong working in between Singapore / Berlin, plays the role of the characters in Fassbinder’s movie Fear Eats the Soul and reproduces the story in the context of Berlin / Kreuzburg. He updates the emotional tensions and moral crises between two people with a syntax sensitive to the historicity of class based and cultural differences.
Aykan Safoğlu from Berlin, discusses the culture of circumcision and a related myth as a social vow; and transforms it into a multi dimensional installation. He reveals the much known but never explicit story around the legendary rice dish of circumcision, with an ironic tone susceptive to cultural memory. The dual channel video installation by the American artist Patty Chang is a documentation of a performance the artist has made with her own mother and father. Exposing the audience to the intimacy of the relationship between her mother and father, Chang brings forward a most dramatic and theatrical spectacle of the relationship between parents and children.
A discussion (You should love Zeki Müren!) organized by and the organizers of the 18th Istanbul LGBT Pride Week as a part of this year’s program aspires to create a queer critical base for further questions and discussions related to the public and private channels of promises, transgressions and alternative forms of social morality.
*Guido Westerwelle, who serves as the German Foreign Minister for Chancellor Merkel’s cabinet visited Turkey in January 2010. During his visit Westerwelle promised Ahde Vefa, the Turkish translation of Pacta Sunt Servanda and, symbolically, the first ‘thing’ Westerwelle learned in Turkish. This political gesture was intended to demonstrate his ongoing support for Turkey’s candidacy for EU membership – a gesture that remains highly opportunistic – but also highlights the irony of his visit given.
**The artist’s name Devrim translates as Revolution in Turkish.
is a Berlin/Istanbul based collaboration that works with the performative forms of critical curating and queer politics. The name comes from the Turkish letter “ğ” as yumuşak ge ’soft g’ – the ninth letter of the Turkish alphabet.
PARTY MADI CLARA live
June 8 Tuesday, 2010
22:00 – 01:00 @ Lokal
dj performance: ece ö.
DISCUSSION “Zeki Müren’i Seviniz!“
June 24 Thursday, 2010
14:30 @ garajistanbul
Participants: Özlem Güçlü, Erden Kosova ve Fatih Özgüven