Sirius descends, Goldelse flickers:
German-Turkish debts of becoming and flickering migrations as remedies
Aykan Safoğlu's exhibition Teneffüs [Recess] took place at Salt Galata, Istanbul, from February 15 to April 24, 2022, as part of Salt's The Sequential series which was programmed by Amira Akbıyıkoğlu and Farah Aksoy. Aykan Safoğlu(1) had an in-depth conversation with Aykan Safoğlu(2) about the artistic research that took place in preparation for Recess. The interview was conducted in September 2023 between Istanbul and Vienna.
AS1: Dear Aykan, your exhibition touches upon many topics and concepts, such as migration, racism related to German citizenship and educational models, but also emotional labor and debts. Recess, I would say, leans on your autobiography and related experiences, such as your high school years and the life histories of close relatives who were labor migrants in Germany. Yet it also engages with historical mega-global events, such as World War I, World War II and the post-war years. As we commence this discussion, can we talk about your initial inspiration for this exhibition?
AS2: Dear Aykan, thank you. Firstly, you decided to conduct this interview even though the exhibition closed in Istanbul almost one and a half years ago. I greatly appreciate your attention. You and I have been following each other’s professional work for over a decade, so you know that I have also been pursuing my artistic research at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna since the fall of 2019. I can say that the exhibition was a direct outcome of this multi-layered research, which deepened with my enrollment there as a doctoral student. Loosely said, this research concentrates on the historical legacies of two institutions from Istanbul: the first one is the İstanbul Erkek Lisesi [Istanbul High School for Boys], a bilingual German-Turkish high school to which I was sent as a student, and the second is Düyûn-ı Umûmiye [the Ottoman Public Debt Administration] (abbreviated as OPDA in English). The İstanbul Erkek Lisesi moved into the headquarters of the ODPA, a 19th century European credit institution, after it ceased its operations in Istanbul—around the 1930s. My research follows the clues and traces of German pedagogical efforts in the interstate collaborations of labor, military, and culture. I ask if and how these collaborations may have established a regime of superiority that favours Germany. Pursuing reflections about my German education and migration experiences in Germany, and leaning on the biography of labor migrant relatives, I have been trying to render concrete my affective research. I must state, frankly, that I had two muses when I was working on my application to the PhD-in-Practice program: the first was Laurent Berlant, with her immense work in the realms of affect theory, especially her seminal book “Cruel Optimism,” and the second was my biological mother. Here is a photograph of her taken at her workplace when she was pregnant with me…
AS1: What was her job?
AS2: My mother served a good term of twenty years as the head of transactions at the analog computer of a bank, Türkiye İş Bankası [Work Bank of Turkey], the first truly national bank of the Turkish Republic. Her workplace resembled a factory of transactions. My birth marks the beginning of her pension years. She had wanted to have another child, as she now proudly states, to celebrate a fond mothering-time, which she couldn’t enjoy as much as she wanted during her previous mothering experiences due to her immense workload.
AS1: One could argue that you were maybe the youngest coworker of this credit institute, employed already as a fetus, in Berlant’s terms?
AS2: A fetus with very attentive listening skills, I would say!
AS1: But wait! I am a little lost. What is the relevance of Laurent Berlant’s work?
AS2: True, it gets a little cryptic here. I was simply inspired to look at images of my German pedagogical track the way Laurent Berlant looked at affects. More precisely, I studied Tina Campt’s thought provoking exercises, broadly, as to how to listen to images, taking up Berlant’s concept of “genre” to decipher the historiography of affects that follow from the German pedagogy of my high school. This was very helpful, especially to categorize the very intensities of what I refer to as “feelings of indebtedness,” which are closely related to my upbringing and German education.
AS1: Is this how you conceptualize your artistic research?
AS2: As an alumnus of a German school abroad in Istanbul housed in a former credit institution’s headquarters, I treat the legacy of the school as that of a bank. Thus, I try to reflect on the affects that I closely affiliate with events that followed me structurally after my high school graduation with the concept “feelings of indebtedness.”
AS1: How does your research deal with such debts?
AS2: Bringing affect theory, Black studies and critical migration studies closer to my artistic research, I have been conducting “desire-based research,” as Eve Tuck suggests, to propose aesthetic, ontological, and phenomenological strategies to alleviate the affective debts resulting from German pedagogical histories of alliances in the region.
AS1: What are those?
AS2: Well, anything from military allyships to interstate contracts that regulate migration and labor, all of which I treat as 20th century products of diplomatic, bureaucratic social conducts of German pedagogy.
AS1: So your artistic research is seeking remedies to the German pedagogical conduct to which you were exposed as a young student?
AS2: It wouldn’t be wrong to say that. I depart from the İstanbul Erkek Lisesi for my artistic research to arrive at an in-depth investigation of the feelings related to German regimes of pedagogical discipline, especially in the realms of migration and labor in the 20th century. And I found inspiration for my methodology and concepts in the İstanbul Erkek Lisesi. The intense clacking sound of the giant computer engine—into which my mom was feeding the chiphered blank sheets—may have also inspired my fetus mind to come up with this artistic methodology, if not the flickering fluorescent tubes in the engine hall. [Laughter]
AS1: The “genre” you describe sounds rather to be one of an “indebted baby.”
AS2: That clacking of computer mechanics might have followed that “indebted baby” further into the fluorescent lit classrooms of İstanbul Erkek Lisesi.
AS1: When the “indebted baby” slowly transitioned into the “indebted student?”
AS2: Yes, and in the classrooms of those German language prep classes, the physics of light, in terms of emission and absorption, may have started to educate me in many unknown ways, luring me to become curious about the affective regimes of the living that laid ahead of me, especially of a particular pedagogical track—that of becoming indebted and German.
AS1: When and how does the “indebted artist” then enter the scene?
AS2: You mean the “indebted German artist?” I can provide you with a detailed inventory of the excessive qualifications of such an artist! Even as a student of İstanbul Erkek Lisesi, I received loans for which I became eligible only after succeeding at a nation-wide exam. Then I received loans from the German Academic Exchange Program and the Turkish Education Association for my MA studies in Germany. And finally, private loans to obtain my MFA at Bard College in New York. These loans I needed to pay back my entire adult artist life!
AS1: This is an impressive, yet indebted CV!
AS2: [Laughter] Yes, indeed a very costly one; both in financial and emotional senses. But if I should respond to your previous question: I guess the “indebted artist” entered the scene when the curators of the 11th Berlin Biennale—María Berríos, Renata Cervetto, Lisette Lagnado, and Agustín Pérez Rubio—commissioned me to produce two new works in early 2020, namely Hundsstern steigt ab [Dog Star Descending]—an essay film—and Null-Defizit (in Ablehnung) [Zero Deficit (in Refusal)]—a photographic sculptural installation.
AS1: These two works were also part of Recess at Salt Galata?
AS2: Indeed, these pieces—produced in 2020 despite the hardships of the pandemic—were the two central works around which I built the entire exhibition at Salt Galata. In search of a rupture within this German pedagogical discipline, those two works were first steps towards translating the main subject of my Ph.D. project, the “feelings of indebtedness,” into an artistic methodology blending the physics of light, affect theory and economics. These two works translate this feeling into an artistic methodology, “flickering migrations,” inspired by my artistic practice. By artistically investigating the frequency and color temperatures of light, they grasp indebtedness in wavelengths and expand it onto the absorption and emission of light. In other words, they flicker for a purpose.
AS1: How so?
AS2: Well, the main source of inspiration for this methodology I borrowed from my education at İstanbul Erkek Lisesi, where I learned the German language. I came to understand that the school’s interior lighting was to dominate the affective regimes of my high school education. The frequencies of light, such as with the flickering of the fluorescent lighting, set the tone for the power structures in our school building. My Ph.D. project thus aims to assign new meanings to emission and absorption, but also the flicker, to not only understand affective indebtedness in optic terms, but also to break the epistemic violence of German pedagogy. Concentrating on the affective potentials of the frequency of light, my dissertation attempts to shine light on the pain that such a curriculum had caused me and my peers—in other words, the suffering we emitted. Laurent Berlant, Tina Campt and T.J. Demos were amazing companions along this lineage of thinking. With their groundbreaking theories, I came to understanding the “still-moving-image” of practice as “redemptive migrant images.”
AS1: Would it be wrong to assume that, for you, İstanbul Erkek Lisesi was the “scene” where a Turkish-speaking student body was exposed to German curricula and emancipation politics, to enable the pursuit of a Western capitalist career track?
AS2: Exactly, and the flickering illuminance in its classrooms was the methodology of our becoming German and indebted. As if every time the light tube flashed, we turned more and more into Germans, and if it didn’t, we were flickering back to our Turkishness. It was a “scene” where different histories and temporalities also mixed. It was as though when the light tube flashed, we were sitting in the classrooms learning German; but when it did not, we were sent back to a credit institution from the nineteenth century. For those two works, I allowed myself to ask, artistically, in what colors my fear and anxiety flashed, and in which German frequencies my desires radiated. These works pursue an artistic language of accountability by experimenting with the physics of light, thus seeking an artistic proposal to alleviate the collective damage of Western capitalism and imperialism. They attest to these concepts through physics, geometry and algebra, putting German cultural hegemony and expansionism under the microscope.
AS1: I guess I can follow your thoughts. When you talk about cultural hegemony in the example of your high school, how do you connect your high school education to the German military efforts of the past century?
AS2: I remember that, in 1997, the school administration organized a school trip to the Dardanelles; it was around the 18th of March, a national holiday to commemorate the Çanakkale Victory and Martyrs’ Day. According to Turkish national history, March 18, 1915 is the momentous day when the Gallipoli Campaign underwent a dramatic turn of events—when Ottoman forces suffered huge losses defending shores in the northwestern Çanakkale province during World War I. It was a brave effort to prevent the Allies from landing on Gallipoli. I must have paid no mind when our history teacher briefed us on how fifty students of our high school, all still minors, fell in this brutal slaughter of an imperialist world war. These students were serving in the Ottoman army under a Prussian commander named Otto Viktor Karl Liman von Sanders, a fact that was certainly beyond what my teenage mind of the time could ever process—as if those kids departed from the German class to join the front. I can’t help but wonder if they understood the orders of their German commander.
AS1: Since when has the German language been implemented in the course material at the Istanbul High School?
AS2: The history of German education at İstanbul Erkek Lisesi, one of the most prestigious schools in Turkey, dates to the beginning of the 20th century. In 1911, Maârif-i Umûmiye Nezâreti [the Ottoman Ministry of Education] decided to introduce German courses into the curricula of certain elite schools in the Ottoman Empire. One of the schools selected for that educational reform was İstanbul Sultanisi, which is today's İstanbul Erkek Lisesi. Since then, and with an era of exception around World War II—when the school ceased their German courses—the German language has remained mandatory for all students of İstanbul Erkek Lisesi as a first foreign language. German has been the language of instruction in courses such as mathematics, algebra, biology, chemistry, and physics. It was no different for me; I was only 11 years old when I enrolled there; the subsequent eight years, I spent with the German language (1995-2003).
AS1: Can you elaborate a little more on Hundsstern steigt ab? Given everything you’ve described here, what shall one expect to experience and understand from this work?
AS2: Commencing with a retrospective gaze on my puberty, Hundsstern steigt ab outlines a new topos for indebtedness with İstanbul Erkek Lisesi at the center of the narrative. The protagonist is my adult self, conversing with my parents through “performance of address,” as coined by Berlant, about familial bias and the alleged complicity of German/Prussian forces in Ottoman atrocities. The images that appear in the film are shredded photographs. A shredder, I feel, has followed me into my adult life in Germany. It is the most bureaucratic of all office tools, yet also the most familiar. It accompanied me during all those years of applications for work and residence permits. All those confidential documents were shredded once they ceased to document an authentic Aykan Safoğlu for bureaucratic purposes. So I decided to turn this tool of violence into my main artistic tool. I shredded printed images from my personal archive to make them flow into a stream of images. In this essay film, those images, shredded vertically or diagonally, are animated to slide from right to left, thereby moving in opposition to the interlacing convention of video-making. This technique causes a flickering image. In a way, the image imitates the excited electron of a fluorescent lamp; it jumps and resists an anthropological plundering gaze, such as of the viewer. My previous work employed artistic strategies that dealt with frequency and the color temperature of images, such as the inconsistent white balance setting of Kırık Beyaz Laleler [Off-White Tulips] (essay film, 2013) or the flashing positive photographs in ziyaret, visit (essay film, 2019), all of which I call moving image works. However, there is something else at stake here. Hundsstern steigt ab has an unconventional editing style. There are far fewer cuts in the film, the images flow with a flicker.
AS1: Is this a technique that you hadn’t employed in your previous work?
AS2: My previous work imagined, cultivated and reflected companionship across cultural, geographical, linguistic, and temporal boundaries by mobilizing a different range of media. Upon migrating to Germany, I began to slow my artistic practice to stretch shared moments in collective memory. With inspiration from the basic principles of photography, I translated them onto affective surfaces. “Photography is writing with light,” as Walter Benjamin puts it. Whether via moving image or performative intervention, I migrate from my own knowledge of photography and the medium's capacity for capturing time to ultimately write with light in varied artistic forms. I adapt photographic concepts of aperture, shutter, and exposure into temporalities that allow for me and my audiences to inhabit different timescapes, and thus to imagine my subjects of interest—contact and togetherness—in motion.
AS1: These aspects I can also relate to the newer works of Recess.
AS2: However, for these two Berlin Biennale productions, a more thought-provoking proposition was the term “still-moving-images” from Black Visual Frequency: A Glossary, assembled by Tina Campt and her students. In this glossary—which I luckily came across through my Ph.D. advisors Anette Baldauf and Renate Lorenz—Tina Campt explains “still-moving-images” as “images that hover between still and moving images; animated still images, slowed or stilled images in motion or visual renderings that blur the distinctions between these multiple genres; images that require the labor of feeling with or through them” (2018, n.p.). Their unique way of thinking in relation to image production inspired me to re-introduce movement into my more recent still and moving images. I developed a set of visual gestures in which I made shredded still images flicker in time and space through orientation and movement. For my moving images, interlacing helped visual layers to submerge and emerge more dynamically, whereas the technique of slit-scan and refraction did the same magic for my still images. I call these newly emergent artistic forms in my practice “redemptive migrant images.” Evanescent images that never ever rest. I was also fascinated to see that I could play with the dialectics of the lender and the borrower this way, so I could deeply embed the dialectics of debt into the realm of my subject: the ontology of the surface and the interdependency of debt and guilt in relation to ethics and aesthetics. This practice seems meaningful, and very useful to me when trying to trace the histories of bankruptcy in my home country. These images flicker artistically, emotionally and ethically—especially in a context between the West and East.
AS1: Then I am glad that they were shown in Istanbul, and not just at the Martin Gropius Bau, where they were initially displayed for the 11th Berlin Biennale. Can we rewind back a little and talk more about Null-Defizit (in Ablehnung)?
AS2: With pleasure! In my moving image works, I draw attention to an imagined simultaneity of the speaker (as in the artist) and the receiver (as in the artist's audience) by contemplating on Laurent Berlant's concept “apostrophe.” This requires an intersubjective space, such as language. In this way, my moving image practice evokes an affective, mindful complicity to discuss dislocation and dispossession with regards to concepts of class, race, gender, and desire. However, Null-Defizit (in Ablehnung) is an attempt at drafting a visual script along the German educational track that allowed me to migrate to Germany. It is a large-scale storyboard consisting of scans of shredded educational materials and photographs from my high-school years and its aftermath. Its inspiration comes from the graph paper, a material that accompanied me along my high-school years in geometry and algebra classes. I physically and digitally manipulated the visual material and translated them into wavelengths to be woven into a fragile, sculptural, perspectival curriculum vitae. In a way, I tried to translate a timeline of “still-moving-images” from my adolescence into a physical sculpture that brought motion to mind. The perception of the work changed with the positionality and proximity of the audience to the work, if not due to their orientation towards the work. It can be read as a queer alternative to the cartesian grid, where normative looking regimes were contested. To me this sculpture functions as a suspension bridge of transference, looking for an escape from the narrative of historical progress, seeking remedies for the trauma of my early German school years.
AS1: They needed to be shown in Istanbul. But why at Salt Galata?
AS2: Because the exhibition at Salt Galata, Recess, also leans on the history of the building of the Istanbul High School. It was not designed as a school. It was commissioned by a credit institution called Dûyun-i Umumiye, which was responsible for the management of the Ottoman foreign debts and established by the European, imperialist countries that had lent money to the Ottoman Empire. It was established to collect Ottoman debts out of fear that the Ottoman Empire would go bankrupt. The architect who designed the building, Alexandre Vallaury, a French-Levantine native of Istanbul, was also the architect of the Salt Galata building. This cultural institution resides in the former headquarters of Osmanlı Bankası [the Ottoman Bank], known from 1863 to 1925 as the Imperial Ottoman Bank. After a meticulous renovation, the building opened its doors in 2011 as Salt Galata, the most prominent archive and research center of Istanbul, in the historic bank district of Istanbul. The fact that these two buildings are siblings, and that they were once spaces dealing with credit, debt, money, and surplus value, compelled me to make the exhibition Recess. When I reviewed the country’s political and economic conditions from a hundred years ago, I saw historical dynamics that resonated with the financial hardships Turkey has been going through for some decades now. Since the country went bankrupt when I was a student at the Istanbul High School, in 2001, I can say that the impetus to start this exhibition was organized along this historical comparison. After all, I didn't study economics, but I am interested as a visual artist in the translation of economics into a visual vocabulary of affective and libidinal economies. Amira Akbıyıkoğlu and Farah Aksoy, the curators of the exhibition series, The Sequential, through which Recess was organized, were also deeply interested in these areas of research. The exhibition hall of Salt Galata is, poetically, located on the same floor as the treasure room of the former Ottoman Bank. We believed that opening up this artistic discussion at Salt Galata would be meaningful. In the end, Salt Galata is a non-profit archive and research center that operates under the sponsorship of the Garanti BBVA, which is a Turkish financial services company based in Turkey, with 86% of its stakes owned by the Spanish bank Banco Bilboa Vizcaya Argentaria.
AS1: Why did you title the show Recess?
AS2: The term refers to an institutional break, a suspension of business or legislative, juridical and educational procedures, often for rest or relaxation. We thought it resonated well with my artistic methodology, which allows moving images to cease, and still images to be set in motion. We thought my “still-moving-images”could be better addressed under this title, also in relation to the building’s history as a bank and the legacy of İstanbul Erkek Lisesi and OPDA.
AS1: Can we also talk a little about the other works?
AS2: Yes, they all have something in common: an uneasiness. They are concerned with “movement.” They reject linearity, as in “progress.” They move, but not to arrive somewhere. They are set in motion to cease, with the hopes that the visitors would be moved by them. Here I should add that Sara Ahmed’s “orientation” is another concept that was extremely helpful for my research. A first work that comes to mind in relation to “orientation” is Depeche Mode. The work is a long glossy strip of tape with holographic prints embossed on it. When installed on the walls at eye level, it sets the visitor’s pace as an intervention into the exhibition space. The control symbols of a Walkman—play, fast forward, rewind, pause, and stop—glitter and flicker on the wall as the visitors move along the work, navigating themselves through the exhibition hall. While the human body runs forward in space, these flickeringabstract commands allow the visitors to fast forward, rewind, pause or cease the time, hence writing alternative scores of the past or imagined futures. The work proposes a different modality where time does not flow linearly.
AS1: Why Depeche Mode?
AS2: Simply because I was a nerdy and depressed eleven-year-old boy when I scored well on the nationwide exams allowing me to enroll in this elite German-Turkish bilingual state school. And with the pocket money that I received from my mother, I had been buying myself some treats that were meant to ease my puberty-induced anxiety. And an audiocassette of Depeche Mode—their 1984 album People are People—needs a special mention here. Among my few life props from that time, it must have been uniquely indispensable to me as I took it with me every day on my way to school.
AS1: So, the band and their music have had a symbolic value for you?
AS2: Depeche Mode was playing on my Walkman even while we were on our way to Gallipoli. Thus, I wanted to take the music, the soundtrack of my high school years, as a companion to this exhibition to propose a choreography for the visitors, a score from my puberty. I wanted them to be lured by the geometric shapes on the tape glittering on the walls, radiating in different rainbow colors, inspiring them as to how to walk differently in the exhibition room— according to their own rhythm. I simply wanted that this work moves them, also literally in the room, with everyone composing a different song. They say “time is money,” so I wanted them to spend it differently in a former bank.
AS1: [Laughter] I love this! But that is not the only artwork of Recess that follows a rainbow!
AS2: Oh, you mean Angelus Novus! It is a large silk-screen print on holographic heat transfer foil, mounted between glass panels. It clearly references the painting of Paul Klee from 1920 with the same title and its idiosyncratic description by Walter Benjamin. In Angelus Novus, Paul Klee depicted an angel figure using an oil transfer technique and Benjamin saw in it a metaphor for human history. Keeping this art historical discussion in mind, I wanted to translate the angel figure into a precarious reproduction of the Viktoria [Victoria] figure that is located on top of the Siegessäule [Victory Column] in Berlin. This gold-plated bronze monument by Friedrich Drake was once erected to celebrate a Prussian military victory, and has since experienced migration and immense destruction herself, ultimately becoming the symbol of queer life in Berlin, and hence of self-determination. With these reflections in mind, I applied the screen-printing technique on a very fragile surface, heat transfer foil, to capture an alternate version of Angelus Novus. My main intention was to open a discussion about queer emancipation, if not its material discrepancies. If one moves around the work, the glossy surface of the foil allows a dispersion of light resulting in different colors being refracted depending on where one stands. Thus, the work questions concepts of relationality and orientation in respect to the politics of the gaze. This ever-changing angel wants to tackle queer agencies of being.
AS1: Why did you choose as main figure the “Goldelse,” which is how the Germans simply and sincerely address the Victoria Statue?
AS2: It was not difficult for me to choose the subject. The first televised image I had seen of Berlin was of “Goldelse,” when the Love Parade was broadcast on Turkish TV. Also the “Goldelse” has a migration background as she has moved locations within Berlin. So, when I arrived in Berlin—the first city I migrated to—I took a photograph of Viktoria, from her back. For Recess, I transferred this photograph via screen-printing onto a gilded holographic heat transfer foil. Because of its thin materiality, the foil is very fragile. It breaks easily, even when you touch it, and would flake off with the slightest move. Screen-printing on it was thus very tedious and it took a long time for the cellulosic dye to dry on the foil. Even just separating the foil from the screen-printing frames required meticulous effort. As its preservation was as hard a task as its production, one can argue that this Angelus Novus was born into a productive contradiction. We could hardly place it without damaging it between the two panels of glass to hang it at the entrance of the exhibition space for this beautiful contradiction to welcome the viewers with its rainbow colors. According to Walter Benjamin, the angel on Klee’s painting finds herself in a turmoil. He interprets this as a flood of the present lingering between the past and the future. It is as if this angel is trying to keep the genealogy of all the events flowing from the past into the future. Through the description of an angel, Walter Benjamin ponders what historical materialism is: historical progress amounts to an oxymoron. This has so poetically resonated with my artistic methodology. This version of Angelus Novus finds herself in a turmoil in 2022, with her escaping colors in a constant refusal of all human projections. Her most significant flight might be from the assumption of queer emancipation, which is often assigned to her.
AS1: Why did you choose this material to work with?
AS2: There is a relevant connection between debt and guilt, two issues intimately connected for German speakers, for the term “Schuld” has at least two meanings: debt, on the one hand, or fault, and the associated guilt on the other. I see this reflected in the epistemology and ontology of the arts. European discussions regarding aesthetics and ethics are closely linked to value production, or, as I often find, to an ambiguous distinction between debt and guilt. I may sound bold here but look at the looted artworks in most significant museums, or recent art-washing incidents… Art practice has never been so closely affiliated with financial, emotional and ethical historical debts. For me, a playful twist takes place on the holographic foil. We know holograms from banknotes or passports as a marker to distinguish the original from the copy; also, as a technique granting one's right to mobility. My working with refracting surfaces is yet another nod to these surveillance technologies. This is a flickering exercise to reorient our gaze, for it to be more versatile in its critique of ethics and aesthetics.
AS1: Your dissertation also addresses your familial ties to Germany; you have close relatives who arrived in Germany as labor migrants. How does your research and methodology relate to them and their life experience as migrants?
AS2: Two aunts on my mother’s side and an uncle on my father’s side joined the migrant workforce in Germany around the 1960s in search of better lives. My uncle unfortunately committed suicide in 1978 near Heidelberg due to mental health problems that accelerated upon his migration. His suicide left his bodily integrity shattered, and my two aunts are suffering from deteriorating health problems resulting from the heavy physical labor they undertook in Germany. There is no way of undoing past atrocities, but how can we alleviate the collateral damage? In pursuit of an answer, I sought to lay bare to my audiences and readership the reflections that followed from the formative educational track that allowed me to migrate to Germany. Can I emit what my uncle absorbed in Germany as a “guest worker,” or how can my “guest worker” aunts inspire me in emitting my own migratory existence as a critique of German coloniality and imperialism? One of the works in Recess titled Wiedervereinigung [Reunification] dealt directly with the history of migration. This work's puzzle pieces welcomed the visitors of Recess, dispersed on the exhibition floor. It revisits the legacy of a lost statue from the public sphere of Istanbul: İşçi Heykeli [The Worker’s Monument] (Muzaffer Ertoran, 1973).
AS1: What is the fate of this statue? Why was it lost?
AS2: The statue was a gesture of tribute that failed over time. It was selected via an open call to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Turkish Republic. A body of a cis-male worker, the statue was meant to honor the migrant workforce that left Turkey for Germany. It might have been a failure from the beginning. But what is more interesting is that the statue had itself become the target of fascist violence, losing his head and glands over time. Ultimately, it became a hybrid form, as Meltem Ahıska puts it, turned into a ghostly appearance from the recent past. And, in 2015, when the district’s municipality decided to redevelop Tophane Park, where the statue had been witnessing time since its inauguration, it ceased to exist, with even its debris disappearing.
AS1: How did you first meet this specter?
AS2: I used to pass this monument at the Tophane Park every day on my way to the İstanbul Erkek Lisesi. Honoring the workers who went abroad, the monument was placed right across from the Institution for Providing Jobs and Employees where the German Immigration Liaison Office operated in the 1970s. In the 1990s, as the monument, a victim to continuous attacks, was in an increasingly vulnerable state, Turkish media outlets were broadcasting increasing right-wing extremist violence targeting migrant workers from Turkey who were residing in Germany. I wanted to revive the sculpture, removed from the park in 2016 and missing since then, with a puzzle piece titled Reunification. By dispersing on the floor, the pieces of a photograph of the sculpture, I wanted to highlight the precarity and fragility of labor and migrant existence. Strangely, the statue of a strong man—a Socialist Realist representation of a “guest worker”—ultimately started to stand for the fragmented body of my uncle Hüseyin. This is a strong “still-moving-image” for me.
AS1: You chose a very significant reference to German history as the title: Wiedervereinigung?
AS2: The German word “Wiedervereinigung”— “reunification” in English—is a compound word referring to a specific moment in German political history, namely the unification of the two Germanys: The East and the West, or the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic, i.e., the capitalist Germany and the communist Germany… It is interesting that the merger of these two separate regimes is called “reunification.” I think we must investigate why the prefix "re" was added to the word “unification” to name this historical event, which took place right after the dissolution of the Iron Curtain. Why has it not been simply called "unification?" The importance of the momentum of 1989 in German political history is undeniable, but we shall never overlook the nationalist social transformation it helped to provoke. In the 1990s, we experienced that the unified German society became more hostile towards migrant communities—so far from the stabilisation suggested in the term “reunification.” There was a very serious increase in violent incidents during this period. The more Germany seemed allegedly re-united, the more polarized, or divided, it had become. Thus, I brought into Salt Galata a jigsaw puzzle of a monument that was meant to represent the largest migrant community of Germany. However, I dispersed it on the exhibition floor to demonstrate how shattered historical materialism is when attempting to tell an account of history in favor of these people.
AS1: Do you make a distinction between you and your relatives who came to Germany as labor migrants?
AS2: I set foot in Germany with more privileges than my relatives who were labor migrants. I had more tools to dismantle the master’s house—if I borrow Audre Lorde’s words to explain my stake here. Many alumni of my high school took professions in finance, diplomacy, or bureaucracy, some even served as the prime ministers of the Turkish Republic. Among them, there are some who took high capitalist maintenance jobs, such as the director of the Turkish Central Bank. I, instead, obtained a film degree in Istanbul, and continued my studies in Germany to practice art. How can I, as an artist, retrospectively lay out an objective chronology of events? How can I reflect on how my German education was “designed?” Politically, there is a need for such discussions, perhaps now more than ever, as the German-Turkish diplomatic relationships nearly crumbled after the recent populist/authoritarian political shifts; and the capitalist/pragmatist reactions to them shifted the dynamics of German-Turkish interstate relationships. Perhaps an inquiry into the archaeology of my own feelings, and an investigation into the algorithms of emotions behind the pursuit of a new European citizenship in this constellation, might provide more elaborate answers to this complex set of questions. Is the “feeling ofindebtedness” that I have known since my time at the elitist Istanbul High School the lost kin of German resentments? I am not sure if I can propose elaborate answers to these pressing issues, but my research asks some relevant questions.
AS1: How else do you think your life experience informs your artistic forms?
AS2: This brings us to the final physical work of Recess that we haven't touched upon yet: decrescendo. This work consists of six aluminum silk screen frames hanging from the ceiling, each displaying a different image exposed on a thin layer of dark blue photo emulsion—all captured by a mobile phone, stemming from my life… The first one that comes to mind is a photograph of my birth certificate from the German hospital in Istanbul called Alman Hastanesi [Deutsches Krankenhaus]. Or a broken champagne glass, piled crates of artwork on an airport trolley, peeled skin of a mandarin with a sticker reading “Aykan,” a German passport, or a pair of worn-out sneakers… I made these “poor” quality images in moments of immense joy, albeit followed by sudden despair. To reflect on this unpredictable nature of the human psyche, and its repercussions for migrants, I chose to employ a well-known printmaking technique: screen-printing. By displaying mirrored images of the prints on the screen frames, rather than the actual prints, I invited the viewer to capture and reproduce the elusive images of these intimate moments in their imagination, but with lesser intensity (as the medium calls it). The double-sidedness of the screens provided versatility on the visual plane, while the mirrored images invited the viewers to submit to an exercise of reorienting how one confronts and reads an artwork. One needs a bit of training to be able to fully decipher the images, and to penetrate their opacity by playing with the available light sources, so as to ultimately un-mirror them in one's mind. While screen-printing is a technique associated with reproduction and opacity, I wanted the viewers to leave the exhibition without having seen a single print copy produced with these six frames. I tried to render an imaginative space where the viewer and the artist mutually exchange something, a rupture in the dialectics of debt, where a spectator is not expected to be stunned by the work of art. Without creating a “feeling of indebtedness,” nor insulting viewer’s intelligence, I sought to propose a formal redemption to affective debts—in collaboration with the audience. Hence the musical title decrescendo, hinting at a decrease in volume as the notation progresses. In a sense, they are images on loan to the viewer, which accumulate in imagination as they diminish in sight. This is a proposal to break the logic of a “feeling of indebtedness,” which I find central to the ontology of Western fine arts.
AS1: So your gender was assigned to you at birth by German nurses?
AS2: [Laughter] Yes! My mother must have had immense trust in German medical care!
AS1: How good was the exhibition’s exposure?
AS2: We worked closely with people who have close ties to student and alumni organizations of the İstanbul Erkek Lisesi; we also tried to bring queer enthusiasts to the show. Amira, one of the curators, organized guided tours to provide those guests with more insights into the artistic research behind the exhibition. İELDER, Boysan’ın Evi, or the Research and Production Support Program of the 17th Istanbul Biennial are examples of such organizations. The exhibition remained open for nine weeks and received more than six thousand visitors amounting to a very diverse audience profile, I would say. I am still processing how so many people, and not only Istanbul natives, could see the exhibition and spend time with my research, artistic forms and methodology.
AS1: Was there any special experience that you remember fondly? One that you hold particularly dear to your heart?
AS2: Yes, the animation workshop we organized, and the collective work that came out of it: Çeşme [The Fountain]. For this project, I traced the origins of German educational efforts to militarist collisions in Istanbul under the Ottoman Empire—a military ally to the Prussian Empire before and during World War I—and stumbled upon images from the turn of the century of the Prussian Army training the Ottoman Army. Some of these military trainings may have taken place in the courtyard of the former Taksim Military Barracks, which were demolished to be replaced by the modernist Gezi Park. This recreational area of Istanbul is also a meaningful site for queer and migrant communities of Istanbul. I organized a lecture performance on its legacy as part of an animation workshop.
AS1: Oh, I missed this work as I only attended the opening. Was it a conceptual decision to conclude the exhibition with a collective work?
AS2: It was an example of a social practice of “interclass contact,” as Samuel R. Delany would put it. In the end, the whole workshop turned out to be a collective experiment and an intervention into the “networking” of Salt Galata. As a mere event of “interclass contact,” it revived the symbolic and literal potentials of a memory site, the fountain of the Gezi Park in Istanbul. Conceived through frequent virtual meetings, the production of the short animation allowed a reciprocal exchange between its participants on topics such as the urban commons, the politics of desire, and necropolitics. Each participant contributed an equal number of frames to the final animation piece—all of them artistic interpretations of the fountain—thus negotiating the formal and ethical aspects of producing a moving image work. Questions regarding the editing of these images and the display of the work were also handled collectively.
AS1: Can you explain to us what happened over the course of the animation workshop?
AS2: The labor that was invested into this short piece of flickering animation sought to pose questions on the politics of duration, sustainability, and continuity when working within an institutional framework. By the end of March 2022—after this workshop, organized midway through the exhibition—we had installed Çeşme in the main entrance of Salt Research. It thus became an experiment for the duration of the exhibition as the work migrated outside of the proposed exhibition time and space. It appeared randomly and may have attracted visitors different from those attracted by the rest of the works in Recess. Our version of the fountain splashed its beautiful waters in the heart of Salt Research, which was originally designed as the main hall of the Ottoman Bank, where the clients' banking requests were executed. This flickering short video generously squirted and splattered all its queer blessings to diminish any feelings of indebtedness and optimisms of the cruel variety. Çeşme was produced in collaboration with Melis Balcı, Vardal Caniş, İnci Furni, Mertcan Mertbilek, Mustafa Kınalı, Yaz Taşçı, and Yasemin Yasu, all of whom generously participated at the animation workshop held on March 12, 18, and 25, 2022 as part of Recess at Salt Galata, Istanbul.
AS1: Such a grand finale for your “migrant images!” Thank you, Aykan, for finding time and having patience to answer my curious questions. Any final words to conclude our discussion?
AS2: I would like to extend my heartfelt gratitude to the institutions and individuals whose support I have always instantly and immensely felt, all through those years, and despite the hardships of a raging pandemic: especially the PhD-in-Practice program, KFS at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, and FWF; and all my colleagues and friends. I am especially indebted to Carlos Kong and Todd Sekuler for their love and care for my language. Also, I am eternally indebted to all of the brilliant authors of the works that I had the privilege to read, feel, follow, contemplate on, and be profoundly influenced by: Laurent Berlant, Tina Campt, Sara Ahmed, T.J. Demos, Eve Tuck, Denise Ferreira da Silva, James Baldwin, Samuel R. Delany, Fred Moten, Stefano Harney, David Graeber, Maurizio Lazzarato. I cherish them all.
AS1: Thank you, dear Aykan. I can’t wait to read the dissertation.
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