ART-PRESENTATION: Nasan Tur- FUNKTIONIEREN
Nasan Tur’s work is often performative and addresses current issues of politics, history and the future of our society in an ironic and critical manner. He examines our coexistence and the behaviour of different people. Often Nasan Tur plays with words. As in “Variationen von Kapital”, a work in which a computer programm devised 41,000 ways to write the word “capital”, which always sounds the same phonetically. In doing so, he stripped the word of its weight, dissolved it and bestowed it with something playful and light.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Blain|Southern Archive
Nasan Tur often creates his work in the form of an art platform where the viewers can take an active role, such as in a recent work featured in the 10th Istanbul Biennial titled “Backpacks”. Here visitors were invited to borrow specially composed multi-task backpacks, that combined a selection of materials and props for particular acts. On leaving the exhibition venue and entering the public realm with the backpack the participants could use the items they found in their chosen bag for acts such as forming a demonstration, making a public announcement, cooking on the side-walk etc. For “FUNKTIONIEREN”, his solo exhibition at Blain|Southern, in Berlin, Nasan Tur transforms the ground floor of the gallery space into a live printmaking studio (the oldest and slowest printing technique). The artist, supported by a team of artisan printmakers, carves questionable statements and slogans into large woodblocks, and then he use them to produce a collection of several different prints. These are hung within the installation, increasingly filling the space. The installation contains tables, shelves, carving tools, computer equipment, printing devices and racks for drying the prints. With endless reproduction of works enabled by the woodblock format, the resulting collection of text-based prints features Tur’s highly contentious aphorisms and philosophical statements, which have in the past included “KNOWLEDGE IS DANGEROUS” and “CONTROL IS NECESSARY”. In the upper floor of the gallery the artists presents two bodies of work in relation to one another. In the series “Sea View” (2016), the artist presents a series of photographic images of seascapes. The question is whether these seascapes, in the light of the refugee crisis, are really as clean, calm and peaceful as they might seem at first sight? The same applies to his recent “Watercolors”. Are the numbers he painted in watercolour on paper really that innocent? Nothing is what it seems! These small watercolours are like gravestones. In resistance to marginalising the tragic number of deaths reported daily by the media, Tur took to painting the numbers of the reported dead along with the date and location of each event. In these numbers, he aims to rescue the memory of these events from fleeting news blasts, and grapples with the futility of measuring such incalculable pain.
Info: Blain|Southern Gallery, Potsdamer Straße 77–87, Berlin, Duration: 2/11/16-27/1/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, www.blainsouthern.com
