Catalog, XXIX. Contemporary Artists Istanbul Exhibition, Aksanat, 2011
Big and small fragments of a tree root and trunk with sawdust are displayed on the gallery floor. It looks like a simple and arbitrary accumulation accommodating the self-contained beauty of the meandering curves of the organic material. Even if some pieces change, the whole will remain robust. However, a closer look reveals much more. Marks of mistreatment are evident in the cracks, tears, and wrenched fibers. The root and the trunk have been attacked with indiscriminate brutality using saws, mallets, and axes. It is shoved out of the earth violently. As the event looks like a crime scene and a field of destruction, it becomes necessary to retrace the thing’s history. As such, the work does not belong to a particular installation history that problematizes and displaces the rationale of the gallery in a humanizing effort to expand the institution’s horizons. It is not a stand-in for something more or less profound than what it is. The installation is not a surreptitious metaphorical gesture. It is a matter of fact. Hence, the title “As if it never existed” refers to the eradication of the object and the removal from the very site that made it, and it, in return, instilled life, too.
The artist stumbled upon the tree in the gardens of Yıldız Technical University (YTU), where she studied. She noticed the tree when only the low stump, which seemed mighty, was left standing. She then recorded the stump, only to see it was completely uprooted. The tree happened to be an old Paulownia. Quite appropriately, Paulownia is a fast-developing tree that can recoup ecologically stressed and degraded lands. Its roots run deep and increase the organic elements, processing and filtering contaminants with a high oxygenation capacity. Paulownias are considered one of the most suitable trees for combating deforestation. In short, they offset the dirty work that capitalist greed produces.
The story of the work runs parallel to a series of recent events at YTU’s main campus abutting Barbaros Boulevard. A former palatial garden, the campus is a beautiful, green, and commanding location in the center of Istanbul. One of the oldest educational institutions in Istanbul, YTU has come under pressure recently in the context of Istanbul’s relentless privatization. Former state monopolies and industries, factories, docks, shipyards, and custom depots have been shopped around and/or sold under dubious public-private ventures. City universities —the grounds of which have been traditionally off-limits to the public—may be up for relocation to remote areas. The argument goes that the city centers are too valuable to be left to university students. The removal of the old Paulownia has similarities too germane to pass upon. One of the most venerable tropes in art history, specifically in romanticism, is the image of a singular tree. Trees echo the reunion with the spiritual self, the visible cycles of life, birth, growth, and decay, and cut through all religions, from animism to shamanism, Judaism, and Christianity. Unfortunately, capitalism has no time for time.
The Bologna process aims to align European universities to neoliberal efficiency and standardization. It produces exchangeability akin to the transportability of goods and services, producing a kind of delocalization hitherto unexperienced. Coupled with this fact, public universities in Turkey invariably have fragile stakeholders. This leaves the universities’ ownership to the appointed and chosen, and top-down decisions are taken under extremely opaque contexts. In such a context, a university property in the center of town whets the appetite. What began as a potential move of the arts faculty with “sound” excuses are frivolous activities to stand in the way of the common good for the university to claim necessary funds?— will undoubtedly break the ground for much worse to come. This is how new capitalism works, allowing a trend from which there is no return. It eradicates the undesirable, renders it invisible, and erases any trace of it. It does more than live and let die. As the philosopher Marina Griznic notes, this implies a fundamental transfer from biopolitics to necropolitics. It is not enough that the tree is cut. It must then be dug out and discarded. The whole must be covered and replaced with a stylish flower bed. Life must be exchanged with surface and style.
The artist placed the Paulonwia right back in the core of the psyche of those who forgot to remember but also for those who never had a memory of it. It does not let us die but allows us to live.
vasıf kortun 