08/99 “In the name of bread for the sake of
land”, Kasa Gallery, Karakoy, Istanbul, Turkey
"Winds into the future", exhibition series by Sabanci University.
Installation: mixed media; wood, nails, tin plate, white cloth, moldy bread
This exhibition made in Kasa Gallery, which was used to be a safe deposition
of a bank. The gallery was in the underground and there were no windows and
it was a place that you can feel the moisture. There were three rooms connecting
to each other with an entrance. I created my own wooden room in the gallery
by playing with it's dimensions. And as a result I had a big corridor. I covered
the walls and the floors of my new place, which relates to a big coffin, with
tin plate. Tin plate is a kind of material that is used in Turkey for the inside
cover of coffins. I cut many tin plates that exactly in the size and in the
form of a coffin and I flattened them. The standard technique for covering a
coffin is with using nail. So I nailed the tin plates onto each other in a spontaneous
way. With this way I tried to create a mass grave. There was a heap of moldy
bread at the corner of the last room. The top of the room was covered with a
white texture, which is specially used for burying the dead body. There was
a little light coming beyond the white texture.
The exhibition title was in the name of bread, for the sake of land. We work
in the name of bread and we struggle for land. These are the things that we
can not give up. The artist has to work in order to continue his or her life.
And death means the end of this struggle. As a result with this work I invited
the visitors to enter in a coffin in a safe area that was once used to store
money and precious goods. And I tried to question the meaning of life and death
by starting from life in the coffin. Bread, is one of the fundamental necessities
in human life. But other than this direct reference, moldy bread may lead one
to speak about the process of change as a result of living organisms constituting
it. In this sense, the work is the simulation of life of men. And I believe
that the coffin itself is a process. And this big coffin had lived its own process.
By touching of the visitors, the tin plates get rusted. And the smell of the
moldy bread captures the whole room.
