Author: Dilek

Linden Tree (In Memory of the Savages Upstairs*)

The work called “Linden Tree” is based on specific fragments from the memoirs of the people who lived and worked in the Prinkipo Greek Orphanage and the sound recordings of the building today. Marika Haçu, who worked as an instructor in the orphanage for many years, talks about the songs that children used to sing under the linden tree in the garden. One of these songs is Η Φλαμουριά which is based on the poem with the same title by Wilhelm Müller from his Winter Journey (Winterreise ). All the poems in the Winter Journey were composed by Schubert and contain typical emotional themes of the romantic era such as yearning and sadness. The Linden Tree is about the intense longing for the past and especially attracts attention with its nostalgia theme.

The origin of the word nostalgia comes from nostos (home-coming) and algia (longing). However, the word did not originate in Ancient Greece but was invented in the 17th century as a medical term in Switzerland. It was used for naming the ailment of the soldiers and students who fell sick missing their hometown (homesick). In this period, it was thought that nostalgia was triggered by the smells, sounds and songs that reminded them of their hometown. In the book The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym writes that in the 17th century people who were displaced from their homes and diagnosed with nostalgia were disconnected from the “present” and produced “erroneous representations” of the past. And she warns us; “Unreflected nostalgia breeds monsters.”

*Akillas Millas, tells the memoirs of the doctor Kriton Dinçmen from Heybeliada, who was responsible for the sanitary care of the children in the Orphanage in his book named “Büyükada: Prinkipo Ada-i Kebir”. When Dinçmen asks the number of children in the school, a number has been told to him “excluding the others”. Upon asking who the others were, he learned that four children, called the “savages”, who fled to the unused top floors and they were nowhere to be found in the huge building.

Zevallı Delikanlı (2012) is a play by Teodoros Akıllıoğlu written in Turkish with the Greek script (Karamanlidika), printed in 1910. The play captures a particular dialect from early 20^th Century Turkish-speaking Orthodox Christians. The video titled Zevallı Delikanlı (2012) is based on the first act of the play. The dialogues in this act are recited by electronic voices of the Text-to-Speech software. The book is situated at Father M. Sakkulides’ Library, Sismanoglio Megaro. Transliteration from Greek script to Latin was made by Şehnaz Şişmanoğlu. 

Thanks: Vasilis Bornovas, Anna Kafetsi, Eva Achladi, Şehnaz Şişmanoğlu, Artemis Papatheodorou and Öğünç Hatipoğlu

Photos: Marili Zarkou

The title of this works is an abbreviation of a sentence from Oğuz Atay’s novel, Tutunamayanlar. kendinibeğenmişçesinesankibizdenöncehiçbirşeysöylenmemişçesinegillerden comes from the second half of the sentence “We are knocking on your doors with an emotion and arrogance unparalleled in world history and without fear of seeming like those who are conceited and behave as if nothing has ever been said before them.” It is transcribed phonetically in Turkish, but with letters from five alphabets: Armenian, Greek, Hebrew, Latin and Arabic, which were used by the multi-lingual population of the Ottoman Empire up until the Alphabet Reform enforced the use of the Latin alphabet in 1928.

Photos: Marili Zarkou and Mustafa Hazneci

Black Wednesday (2016) is a board game that is based on an auction that took place on December 12, 2004 in Istanbul. The auctioned off art works previously belonged to banks that went bankrupt during one of the biggest economical crisis (The Black Wednesday) in the history of the Republic triggered by the ‘postmodern coup’ in 1998.  More than 20 private banks filed bankruptcy between 1998 and 2001 and were taken over by the Savings Deposit Insurance Fund (TMSF). TMSF auctioned off over 300 artworks that are acclaimed to be part of the art historical canon. The Ministry of Culture and Tourism made an attempt to acquire the collection as a whole. However this failed and instead the new and blossoming art institutions of Istanbul such as Istanbul Modern and Pera Museum acquired many of the important works. Inspired by this dramatic turn of events which marks a milestone in the expansion of the art market and the rapid institutionalization of art in the first half of 2000s, the board game brings together the artworks, the institutions and different ‘what if scenarios’.

The game is developed in collaboration with Zeynep Öz.

Inspired by the painting the Hermit Monkey (1840 – 1845) by Leonardo Alenza situated at the Museo del Romanticismo in Madrid, the works the Lovesick Violet, the Common Box and Unclassified and Shuffled complement one another and serve as a ground to sketch thoughts and observations about the classification of plants and animals.

The Lovesick Violet is based on Erasmus Darwin’s ‘Botanic Garden: The Loves of the Plants’, a poem with philosophical notes (1791). Darwin’s poem is a rendering of Linnaeus’ Systema Naturae. The Lovesick Violet, as an interpretation of Darwin’s poem, points the viewer towards the emotional states that are attributed to the plants in this poem.

The ‘commonbox’ (Buxus sempervirens) is an evergreen plant that is widely used in private and public gardens, urban spaces and also in botanical gardens. Its commonplace occurance is also what grants the plant a certain degree of invisibility. The plant is used in framing, dividing, partitioning, hiding and also defining borders. The common box is used in the Botanical Garden in Madrid as a border around the flowerbeds. Within the area defined by the common box lies a fully controlled, labeled, classified and curated area of plants. In the exhibition space ‘Buxus sempervirens’ is used in constructing a rectangular, empty frame.

Unclassified and Shuffled is an attempt to gather all images, including paintings, drawings, prints and watercolours, with any kind of animal representation dated 1750 -­‐1900. The image compilation is from collections in Madrid, which are either public or private, but that the public can currently access to. Over 700 images are collected from the archives and online databases. These are: Museo Nacional Del Prado, Museo del Romanticismo, Fundación Lázaro Galdiano, Museo Thyssen-­‐ Bornemisza in Madrid. The collected images are shuffled and presented in 3 volumes, bound in cow leather.

In Phantom Bildung, the players are art institutions. All have a collection to start the game, but the game is not about your collection. In Phantom Bildung, how you formulate your collection matters as much as whether your institution is reviewed/liked by the tastemaker critics of our time and whether events of historical value take place there. In a combination of market, historical and symbolic values, the players compete be the most powerful art institution. Over the course of four rounds (or until the Situation Cards are finished), players try to earn the highest market, symbolic and historical values for their institution. There is a chance there might be three separate winners of this game!

The boardgame is developed in collaboration with Zeynep Öz. It is based on research about the history of the kunstverein model and in particular the history of the Westfalischer Kunstverein.

Commissioned as part of Selling Snails in the Muslim Neighborhood curated by Zeynep Öz for the Westfalischer Kunstverein in 2013. Phantom Bildung game sessions took place as Stammtisch events at the Pinkus brewery in Münster.

Photos: Katja Schröder, Dilek Winchester

Special thanks to Playback Theater actors: Catherine Pontic, Celine Bruneau, Galatee Castelin, Nadia Lotti, Nili Lubrani Rolnik, Yolande Chabel and Yves Postic

The books tea, sunflowerseeds, kids, et al. (2005) and liqueur and chocolate (2006) emerged from the work we undertook collaboratively with psycho-dramatist Arzu Soysal. We invented a game inspired by the psychodrama techniques and played two different versions of this game with women in two different cities. The books are based on documentation of the games we played with our hosts during home visits. In Diyarbakır, we were guests in several houses in Hançepek and in İstanbul, we chose to do visits in the area that stretches between Kadikoy and Bostancı. The social network that we temporarily and coincidentally became part of was centered around a launderette in Hancepek and we were hardly aware of the rules that applied within it. However in Istanbul, we repositioned ourselves within a network that we are already loosely a part of and therefore fully aware of its rules and structure.

The books tea, sunflowerseeds, kids, et al. (2005) and liqueur and chocolate (2006) emerged from the work we undertook collaboratively with psychologist/psychodramatist Arzu Soysal. We invented a game inspired by the psychodrama techniques and played two different versions of this game with women in two different cities. The books are based on documentation of the games we played with our hosts during home visits. In Diyarbakır, we were guests in several houses in Hançepek and in İstanbul, we chose to do visits in the area that stretches between Kadikoy and Bostancı. The social network that we temporarily and coincidentally became part of was centered around a launderette in Hancepek and we were hardly aware of the rules that applied within it. However in Istanbul, we repositioned ourselves within a network that we are already loosely a part of and therefore fully aware of its rules and structure. These books are the first two in a series of multi-person narratives.

çay, çekirdek, çoluk çocuk

Limited edition of 150

tea, sunflowerseeds, kids, et al.

Translated by Liz Amado.

Limited edition of 50

First version of the game: Hançepek, Diyarbakır, 2005.

liqueur and chocolate

Second version of the game: Bahariye, Moda, Kiziltoprak, Ziverbey, Feneryolu, Selamiçeşme, Göztepe, Erenköy, Suadiye, İstanbul, March-April 2006