Artist: Fatoş Irwen
Kurdish artist Fatoş İrwen, who was a guest at AIR – ARTIST IN RESIDENCE Niederösterreich in September and October, addresses questions of justice, power, and freedom in her decidedly process-based works that are situated dialectically between individual and collective history. Employing modest materials such as paper, tea, and hair, Irwen creates simple yet powerful poetic metaphors and narratives. Individual works transcend their specific temporal contexts and pose fundamental questions concerning existence as well as examine the interconnectedness of all living beings. As such, the theme of freedom becomes legible as an essential horizon and meta-concern of her aesthetic thinking. Irwen’s works on paper, objects, performances, and films operate at the intersection of the self and the world, of subject and society. Boundaries between the real, the imaginary, and the remembered, between the dreamlike and the unconscious, but also between dream and trauma are revealed to be fluid, the relationship between inner and outer perception, between body and space/landscape appears permeable and yet also ambivalent.
As a Kurdish woman, Fatoş İrwen has been confronted with forms of oppression and persecution since her childhood. She was arbitrarily arrested twice; the second time she was detained for over three years. Some of the works shown in IMPROPER, specifically all of the paper and hair works, date from İrwen’s second detention in Diyarbakır from 2017 to 2020. A striving for freedom defines Fatoş İrwen’s works thematically, but another essential strand is also recognizable here: the theme of women’s rights. This is reflected in certain works from this period in a decidedly participatory way. For instance, Irwen collected the hair of her fellow detainees to then use it as an artistic material with emancipatory potential, giving it a voice in the installations Safety net and Skein.
An important aspect of the IMPROPER exhibition is the interweaving of İrwen’s earlier works with works created during her time in prison from 2017 to 2020. İrwen’s thoughts and actions cannot be boiled down to her period of creative output while in detention, nor should her works be limited solely to the theme of oppression. The configuration of eleven total works encompasses seven pictorial and object-like works from the time of her imprisonment in Diyarbakir juxtaposed with three films (video performances) created before her time in prison. The video performances Şiryan (2012), Salt (2013) and Sur-Fragments (2017) explore the interconnections between place, history, dream, and trauma in subtle, poetic as well as haunting ways. Salt (2013) and Sur-Fragments in particular pose the fundamental question of how one is still capable of existing, still living, after experiencing the traumatizing events of oppression and violence in such places (Diyarbakir, Salt Lake). Instead of turning her back on the city or area, İrwen deals with the said places in a mnemic and highly symbolic-performative way.
Sur Fragments presents various scenes from İrwen’s day-long performance in 2017 in Diyarbakir, her birthplace and former hometown, condensed into a seven-minute filmic narrative. The film, in which Irwen works through external and internal mnemic images in a simple yet intense fashion, actively challenges the viewer to decipher the various performative scenes, to read them symbolically. The work is based on the extremely violent events that took place in 2015 and 2016, when the Kurdish population of Diyarbakir was viciously attacked, crimes that went unpunished and severely traumatized those involved. The performance poses the question how can one still live in a place with a history of such traumatizing events. And yet subtle instances of individual histories in İrwen’s performance-film also struggle not to be overwritten and absorbed by the traumatic events. Sur Fragments is far more than an investigation of contradictory images, it is a narrative, symbolic, performative attempt to confront the traumatic legacy of the place as well as to reappropriate it, to in any case not let it be taken or chased away—not even symbolically.
The film begins with a scene of the artist dragging a bundle of old books behind her. The books are important works of history, philosophy, and religion. How can these authorities still claim validity, let alone be considered sacred, in a world that overlooks such crimes? In another scene, the artist is seen walking back and forth apathetically, as if she were imprisoned, locked up, because, in the artist’s view, the entire city (Diyarbakir) has, politically speaking, been like an open-air prison for years. In another scene, the artist waters the pavement as if tending a grave. Missing people, wars, unsolved murders, İrwen describes the city as a palimpsest-like grave, the watering becomes a mourning process, a ritual of mourning not officially permitted. In a final scene, the artist lets a watermelon fall from above and burst on the ground. The area around Diyarbakir is known for cultivating melons; the city is bombarded with advertising images of small children with or inside a giant watermelon. The advertising campaign is indicative of such attempts to reduce the public perception of Diyarbakir to absurd things, to simply overwrite the political and historical events and push them out of consciousness.
The three-minute video Salt is based on İrwen’s one-day performance in which she walked for hours in Salt Lake, a hypersaline lake in the middle of Turkey. Like Sur Fragments, this work is based on the artist’s own traumatic experiences. Fatoş İrwen was not only arrested for the first time in 2012, but in the same year several family members were attacked, beaten, and lynched in various provinces of Turkey because of their Kurdish backgrounds. When İrwen was a child, her mother was attacked in the same area, a formative experience for İrwen that was directly reactivated by the attacks in 2012. İrwen’s way of dealing with the situation was to consciously confront the traumas and go directly to the center of the threat and violence, to an area where Kurds are still constantly threatened by a culture of lynching. For many hours, the artist walked straight ahead in the knee-deep water of the salt lake, wearing only a thin scarf, a Tulbent scarf, the same scarf worn by Kurdish Peace Mothers during their political protests and which is thus of great symbolic significance. Irwen’s exposure and defenselessness during the performance embodies a state of continuous confrontation with what the artist calls “the entire mass of potential attacks.” İrwen walked straight ahead until her feet began to bleed under the effects of the aggressive salt. The locals watched her with suspicion, and the honking of passing cars, as well as harassment and verbal abuse, are repeatedly audible.
The IMPROPER exhibition presents the various ways in which Fatoş İrwen examines themes of oppression, absence of freedom, but also feminism and women’s rights. The exhibited paper works and hair objects, all of which date from İrwen’s time in detention from 2017 to 2020, consolidate and link these themes together, poetically directing the thematic focus towards a questioning of and a striving for freedom, indeed survival in a very fundamental sense. Read indexically and as an aesthetic of action, the works reflect the experiences of the artist accumulated over a lifetime, even during imprisonment.
In the works on paper, coated with tea and with strands of hair and in some cases staples or safety pins, the artist seeks to articulate observations, thoughts, and imaginings of daily life in prison but also to reflect on and interpret them. “All are an effort and an action to connect with life, with the world,” says the artist. At the same time, they form a kind of residuum, an inner protective space that turns what is perceived, thought, and imagined outwards—as opposed to inwards—giving it form and expression and thus also constituting an element of resistance and steadfastness. As in A Ghost Tree on the Wall, İrwen starts from the smallest observations, such as figurations of light and shadows appearing on an opposite wall in the prison. And on the corridors of the prison yards, there were movements of light whose origins Irwen was unable to identify, but in them she deciphered a tree-like shape, akin to a tree whose leaves are moved by the wind. “And now I had,” said the artist, “a tree that no one could cut down.”
A similar protective quality is evident in Eye (Nazar), particularly in relation to the adjacent paper work Cracked Ground, configured from two A4 sheets of paper sewn together with a lock of hair. The A4 sheets were, along with tea (as pigment), needle, and thread (İrwen’s hair), the only materials the artist was able to use. During her imprisonment, Fatoş İrwen intensively studied the history of prison resistance, in particular the history of women’s resistance. İrwen began to conduct detailed interviews with long-term female inmates and in researching their histories she took notes and wrote articles. One day, during a search of her cell, all the materials were ransacked, notebooks and notes torn up, books confiscated. During the subsequent cleanup, the artist began to repair and sew together the torn papers; ultimately, she needed a support to work on, a “ground, a foundation before the words,” hence the title Cracked Ground. In order to protect her space—here pictorial space stands metaphorically for personal space—the artist in Eye (Nazar) affixes a safety pin to a writing or image ground sewn together from two A4 sheets; according to a common superstition the safety pin protects against evil stares. Read in this way, Cracked Ground marks the attempt to “first create a space for myself,” whereas Eye (Nazar) seeks to enlarge and protect this space.
In Paceing (Volta), İrwen describes an account—actually her account—of walking around in prison. The geometric shapes (circles, rectangles) the artist creates with strands of hair on paper are notations of various patterns of movements that the artist consciously altered and varied every day, since walking in prison means walking around the yard non-stop in order to fulfill one’s daily need for movement. Back and forth, left and right, diagonally, in a circle, in a square, etc. Walking in a confined space, especially in a large group of women, became a choreographic, even mathematical challenge and mental exercise.
A similar, albeit far more poetic and narrative form of imagination is evident in the two medium-format works on paper, Courtyard Travelers. The artist depicts a lateral view of a natural landscape, creating the impression of almost being on the ground, in the grass. Blades of grass are represented by the artist’s individual hairs, affixed to the paper using homemade rice glue, but also by dried blades of grass brought by birds into the prison yard and secretly collected by Irwen and incorporated into the picture. Below the natural scenery, along the lower edge of the picture surface consisting of several A4 sheets of paper, are a handful of tender lines outlining an imaginary journey in a few, brief words: "courtyard wanderers, steps and step... wandering lands inside... wandering walls... a tiny thing carried by birds, a whole Mesopotamia, in the women’s step.”
The fragmentary contours of that journey allude to a game devised by Fatoş İrwen and arranged with other inmates as a daily mental exercise. Every day, on their prison walks, the women talked to one another about imaginary journeys, often to nature, to a forest, to a distant country, or an interesting city. These fictitious journeys, told while walking in a confined space, marked a special connection to the world under the conditions of imprisonment, but also to each other, in order to penetrate and overcome their given circumstances, the prison. The women were able to create and cultivate nature in their dreams with and for each other, and this was far more than merely an imaginary undertaking. “It was,” says İrwen, “as if we were discovering the world anew every day, like a traveler.” This second work ends at the bottom edge of the picture with the evocative words “You don’t know, we traveled the world step by step, a world for each day, we did it between four walls, endless... an eternity was laid out before us, our bodies, endless...”
Against the backdrop of censorship, the comprehensive ban on writing the artist was subjected to, İrwen’s aesthetic language takes on a deeper, more urgent semantic dimension. Modest, poetic, pictorial impressions and notes are thus able to articulate existential longings and thoughts. A short sentence becomes an aphorism, a splotch becomes an image of hope, a productive form of escapism. The artist had to rigorously reduce things so that she could work. And yet her language never lacks or compensates for anything. Every material-language sign, every metaphor is in itself simple, but also defined and essential. “Our actions do not always have to make big claims,” says Fatoş İrwen; “Sometimes a tiny moment in life is a great claim in itself.” Her minimalist material-language contrasts with a representational “naturalism,” a view of nature actually seen from within. The representation of time, of becoming, of growth, alters any ostensible referential power, indeed its ontology, pushing it subtly and yet unconditionally towards freedom per se.
Working with her own hair, as seen in the video Şiryan (2012) but also in the installation works Skein (Çile) and Safety net (for women), is evident in Fatoş İrwen’s work from an early age. Since childhood, the artist has collected her own hair, using it as sewing thread and ornamenting, at the time still playfully, her own fingers and body with sewn items. This very activity, as if the artist had intuitively anticipated later political events, forms the basis and central metaphor of the video Şiryan. When she was first arrested in 2012, the police were unable to read İrwen’s fingerprints given the damage to her epidermis, thus rendering the system absurd and signaling the inadequacy of the system in this instance. This paradoxical experience, this unconscious, anticipated refusal, led İrwen to create an hour-long performance in which the artist decorated her main arteries and veins (Kurdish: Siryan) by stitching the epidermis, only to then roughly tear out all the ornamentation from the epidermis and destroy it.
Until her imprisonment in 2017, Irwen’s working with hair was highly self-referential and self-reflective. Under the conditions of imprisonment, however, the artist was quickly challenged to change and expand her work with her own hair. The artist began collecting hair from various fellow inmates and spinning it into a wool-like yarn, which she compacted into a kind of hair ball in Skein (Çile). Working with hair, its meaning and semantics, was inevitably expanded and transformed. The now collective hair functions as a symbol of connection and togetherness, a sign of a strong collective body. During a hunger strike in which several inmates shaved off their hair in protest and gave it to İrwen, the artist wove Safety net (for women), a protective net that occupies the exhibition space like a shield, like an imaginary wall. The production of this collective gesture transforms the material hair into a dialectic but also unifying symbol of individuality and community, and even further, into a symbol of a form of freedom that transcends the boundaries of the individual subject.
İrwen’s works thrive on a form of intrinsic tension; their poetic appearance and openness also speak of actual threats and oppression, even of persecution and crime. Inherent to the work is an oppressive, latently uncanny quality, but also a calm strength and sense of hope. The viewer is not only addressed and involved in the work visually, poetically, and imaginatively, but to a significant degree also relationally and emphatically. However, it is under the very conditions of oppression and powerlessness that Fatoş İrwen also insists on a form of artistic autonomy. The entity-like quality of her works, their discrete, inner power, succeed in penetrating and transcending repressive, situational circumstances, overcoming these by means of artistic thought and action. Here, art is not simply situated in time, but thinks and operates beyond it, beyond the present circumstances. In this sense, it has the power to transcend time, to link different periods together. It is not just a mirror, but an expression of free thought, of freedom per se. Fatoş İrwen’s works are characterized by a dialectic that moves from the self to the world. Seeing and viewing/perception is not a uni-directional process, but takes place in dialogue and in the interplay between inner and outer seeing. In transforming her ideas artistically, İrwen turns her attention toward the inner aspects of seeing, a feeling, tactile, emphatic, relational seeing of imaginary potential.
A central metaphor in İrwen’s work is the notion of growth, of what is grown. The natural (blades of grass) but also the “medium” of hair stand for life and vitality, for beauty and ultimately for freedom. Everything that grows strives to be free, strives to grow and develop. The autopoiesis of nature thus reflects İrwen’s striving for freedom, especially in a political sense. The link between growth and freedom is reflected in İrwen’s material language, its tactile qualities, but also in a dialectic of what is grown, which is and what will become of it, and what has been created, artificially and artistically formed. It is precisely in the modesty of the means, that minimum of means, where İrwen’s approach of only adding what is necessary to what is created and what already exists is made evident. Inherent to every aesthetic articulation therefore is an element of inner necessity, which alludes to a process of introspection that seeks to translate itself into a kind of tactile seeing. In the best sense, İrwen’s works have a poetic, essentialist quality, what they articulate is modest but at the same time necessary. And this is the very reason why they are so compelling, they do not impose themselves, do not report or comment, but rather try to make one see in an ontological and existential sense.
Art and life, but also art, political thinking and action, are intertwined in Fatoş İrwen's work in a subtle but also urgent way. Her thinking is not limited to actual, current circumstances, but is based on a deep connection with all living things, with the elements of the earth, indeed with all beings, far beyond her own limited existence. Recognizable in this, or precisely so, is a universal, deeply philosophical approach, yet one where the political is always taken into account. Accordingly, poetic, sensual-simple, narrative, and associative aspects are of an entirely anti-escapist nature. Thus, the paper works, which initially seem dreamy and introverted, can, in their simplicity and modesty, especially under the auspices of political repression and threats, address questions of existence in Irwen’s works in a radically gentle way—while constantly referencing freedom as the most fundamental good as well as the central motif of artistic thought and action.
Text: David Komary
Translation: Erik Smith
|
