Murmuring

The meaning is considered to come from the sound made by leaves rubbing against each other, referred to as rustling. Life blossoms within this bare murmur. The sounds heard are not only the leaves and the wind, but also the voice of the artist that is heard quietly. Seza Paker’s video work Exercise, with its reference to Kurt Schwitters’s Ursonate, forms the totalitarian threshold and builds up our momentum to enter the exhibition. Also, her Untitled (les mot-couleurs) assemblages reference artists who use colours and the namelessness of the history of painting. For the artist, the series Colour-Words is reminiscent of the time before and after WWI. Seza Paker’s Colour-Words are linked to a story by the French writer Bernard Quiriny, Les mots en héritages. The story is about the traces left on the walls of a dilapidated castle. These traces reveal the paintings that used to hang there. In the Absinthe video, a memory submerged under water and archaeological objects under water complement each other. The sounds included in the sound installation are the sounds of two different geographies, the histories of Istanbul and Montparnasse in the 1910s.

Ayşe Erkmen’s work is made up of 168 leaves, evoking rumination on tree branches and how nature is being decimated. The strange, eerie murmurs of the blowing and whispering sounds are reminiscent of the silence that is drowned in the scream of the darkness. In her video, Conversations Taksim Square, Ayşe Erkmen narrates the Scherezade tales through a representational text. Gossip, hearsay. Each time the letters tell us the tale; the tale becomes abstract, the gossip is squeezed into the letters. When Ayşe Erkmen put Mış Miş on the walls, she used the verb tense used in fairy tales: This is how it was: past tense with Mış Miş. On the other hand, the wind of the three women’s sessions blow-drying their hair directs us towards the post-electricity era of industrial society rather than natural wind. Ali Kazma’s video Play shows rehearsals of Hamlet by a famous theatre troupe in New York, The Wooster Group. The murmurings between the sound, the whispering, and the prompter call the viewer towards the rehearsal. In Clerk, Ali Kazma shows a clerk who constantly repeats the same movement, just like a Dadaist performance. The calligraphic hand gesture, moving across, reveals the murmurings of pen on paper, meticulously, graced by the hand’s movement on paper. Ali Kazma’s images from the post-Fordist era are bereft of people and nature and shifted towards machines (Automobile Factory and Jean Factory). He gives us machinelike movement instead of “sounds and smells.”

Murmuring: Ayşe Erkmen, Ali Kazma, Seza Paker

The meaning is considered to come from the sound made by leaves rubbing against each other, referred to as rustling. Life blossoms within this bare murmur. The sounds heard are ...