homework

anny and sibel öztürk
frankfurt

The Coro­na Pan­dem­ic has refined more activ­i­ties than usu­al to the fam­i­ly home. As a con­se­quence we intend to use our liv­ing room as the exclu­sive stu­dio place for the man­u­fac­tur­ing of an exhi­bi­tion for HOME (Frankfurt/Tel Aviv): All arte­facts will be entire­ly recruit­ed from house­hold objects. Books and mag­a­zines will serve as a source for col­lage paper works, glass­es, vas­es, cut­lery and plates func­tion as the ground­work for sculp­tur­al col­lages. Car­pets and pieces of fur­ni­ture will be our sub­sti­tute can­vas­es for a series of paint­ings. This indoor effort will sim­u­late a lock­down of all artis­tic activ­i­ties to a stu­dio space that inescapably unfolds between sofa and arm­chairs, tables, stools and across all floors.

The prod­ucts of these efforts will be fea­tured in short videos we will stage at our liv­ing room stu­dios in Mühlheim am Main. Fur­ther­more they will form the basis of an inter­im exhi­bi­tion at “Gus­tav”, a liv­ing room project space in Wanne-Eick­el, Ger­many. Videos and exhi­bi­tion will be accom­pa­nied by a sound­track pro­vid­ed by the musi­cian and com­pos­er Steve Jansen.

The home stu­dio work, the videos and the exhi­bi­tion serve as a lab­o­ra­to­ry in which we intend to con­ceive the mod­u­lus for an open form exhi­bi­tion project. It will pro­vide us with a blue print that will allow us to respond with great flex­i­bil­i­ty to the spe­cif­ic require­ments of each of the sites of the HOME project.

Though we will not (or hard­ly ever) leave the house for our project for HOME, its nar­ra­tive will pro­vide a rich fab­ric of tales of jour­neys and migra­tion. All of the images and objects that become source and ingre­di­ent of our home­brew endeav­our, will bring their own sto­ry, their own his­to­ry with them. All has been in use before as a part of sto­ry­hold­ing, a part of fam­i­ly life, rep­re­sent­ing pri­vate sen­ti­ment along with cul­tur­al her­itage, rich with the sed­i­ments of time and the tear and ware of hav­ing been han­dled over and over again. With the means of col­lage and paint­ing we will intro­duce our own nar­ra­tives – not in an approach to over­write, but to cre­ate and fur­ther devel­op a dia­logue by freely weav­ing into such fab­ric of tales.

With a long­stand­ing back­ground of migra­tion in our fam­i­ly with­in the last four gen­er­a­tions, from Turkey to Romania/Bulgary/Cherkessia to Turkey to Ger­many, we find our­selves root­ed in more than one coun­try, in more than one cul­ture. Here mem­o­ries and nar­ra­tives know more than one place and some­times it is the blend­ing of loca­tions and cul­tures that com­pletes an appro­pri­ate image for us. Some of our projects in HOME show­case an inti­mate fam­i­ly con­nec­tion. Hon­our­ing the mem­o­ry of our pater­nal grand­moth­er, a car­pet design­er and man­u­fac­tur­er, our car­pet paint­ings are a vital part of an artis­tic inter­cul­tur­al lineage.

2021, March 1

2021, Feb­ru­ary 12