Duble Hikaye/Two narrations

Artist Gülçin Aksoy shows the contradictions of the Turkish societies political and social development by creating a complex narration with several subtexts and layers. Performance elements, Photographs, Videos, Sculptures, Music, Poems, Collages, Textiles are used to create the visual and acustical atmosphere for telling a story with mainly two angles: the spirit of the Republic was frozen to an authoritarian, unflexible Facade of a power abusing male elite by three military takeovers. The whole society but also the family life got shaped by this rigid reality. Gülçin Aksoy illustrates this two axes, the structural and the personal, by embedding the tragic story of the loss of one of her sisters into her own questioning of the narrations of the Republic.

The family is coming from Samsun, the city on the Black Sea Cost, where the war of İndependence started 1919. Today monuments of Atatürk and the independence war are overpresent. The artist visualized her performative intervention in one of this typical memorial sides. In 1984, Gülçin Aksoy was 19 years old then, one of her two sisters got killed as part of the rebellious Leftist Movement. She calls her Ka, a shortening of the real name, that isn’t said. Ka was the twin of GA. The surviving twin, Gülçin Aksoy’s second sister, had to escape to Exile in Sweden. She takes a pair of Pants and a Jacket from Gülçin as her dress for leaving the country. Eleven years will pass until the sisters will see each other again.

GA kept the clothing of her sister as the last affectionate gift through the years. When Gülçin Aksoy visited her sister in Sweden, she did a couple of performative works with this suit. Different shades of the uniforms of the rebellion are mixed with the clothing from the 1980th in a Video shot in a Swedish Forest. Ironically the 1980th suit has stripes like the ones of convict’s uniforms of former times. The suit, the stripes, the yellow leeves of a warm Swedish Fall are coming along with a beautiful Swedish existentialist song. The Set up transports the melancholy of individuals struggling with a storm-worn country and it’s contradictions.

Exhibition at DEPO-Istanbul, 27.02.-13.04.2014