Undesire

Artists: Fikret Atay, Phil Collins, Inci Eviner and Dan Perjovschi

curated by Vasif Kortun

April 18 – May 17, 2003

Apex Art, New York, NY, USA

Undesire came on the heels of the so-called coalition forces’ invasion of Iraq. The war prompted me to seek a different exhibition altogether; I was already extremely worried about the swift implementation of the new USA master plan following 9/11. 9-11 was just an excuse to enforce a part of a new world plan with the arms (USA), drugs (Afghanistan), and oil (Iraq) scheme.

The United States, a country where I had spent many happy years, became uncanny. It was no longer a place I could recognize or one I wanted to visit again. I suspect the same would hold for many people living in the USA or elsewhere. I am not the kind of person to give fast responses to political situations, and I continue to live in a country that, along with Israel, is considered ‘high on the list’ in terms of the disregard of UN resolutions. I have never relied on contemporary art as a direct means of communicating political issues. Whatever can be reduced to language is often articulated more effectively and quickly through different media. Hence, Undesire as an exhibition is not about representation. It is not even political. I would rather pivot on a notion of proximity, that the exhibition feels close to your skin, closer than one would have liked, but it does not ask for empathy.

Fikret Atay lives near the Iraqi-Turkish border in the small city of Batman, located on the Tigris River. Batman is a sad, oil-producing town with a phenomenally high suicide rate among women. The city has suffered under extraordinary security measures and unaccounted murders for the last two decades. Imagine you are twenty years old, and the life you call normal is about living under many different guns, de facto curfews, and an oppressive sense of tradition. The two low-tech, real-time videos Atay has produced are of very young people. One is a kind of “war dance,” a folkloric dance in what seems to be the corridor of a school, and the other is of two kids in a sort of strange local song-and-dance in the cabin of an automatic teller machine during the evening hours.

Phil Collins’ video, Baghdad Screen Tests, is a muted travel log. The protagonists are often silent as if to say: Why waste their time if there is no truth value attributed to them when even the BBC chooses not to represent the Iraqi populace directly? They may be who they are, but in the centuries-old construction of the orientalist subject in media representation, they merely become fiction. Months later, after this work was finished, the aggressive minority of the alleged coalition is busy bombing the hell out of this civilian “fiction” with “intelligent” bombs even while I write these lines.

Inci Eviner has made a wallpaper for this project. The wallpaper resonates at different levels. The wallpaper is something that conceals a place and turns it into a surface, and often covers up the poverty. Eviner’s work also recalls the eternal sunsets, Alpine views, and idyllic large landscape images used as “wallpaper” from the late 1960s and 1970s. The pictures on them, however, invite a rethinking of the interior, almost holy for the various cultures of the eastern Mediterranean, as a site where conspiracy and terror, such as live bombs, can be designed intimately. In the east Mediterranean, the street is often thought of as a site that belongs to the colonizer, the state, and an ascriptive modernity. The home, on the contrary, is the flag-bearer of tradition and the final border.

Dan Perjovschi works in the most efficient way possible. He creates direct drawings accompanied by brief texts, which then travel across the web to any exhibition. He has created, over the last few years, a structure that has transformed a fragile and disempowered situation into one of brilliant mobility and access. At Apexart, the projections will be displayed with the aid of a presentation program and updated during the exhibition’s run, responding to changes in the international situation and the ongoing war, which I hope will end soon, regardless of who the victims may be.