Ayfer Karabıyık presents the last part of Borrowed Works series, one night stand - a retention event. Artists İpek Burçak with Mix performance and Gülce Fitzek with Pulse performance will accompany Karabıyık's night.
Overturning the appropriation art
Appropriation art has turned out to be one of the prominent discussions with the rise of contemporary art. But, besides judicial terms, how can we look at the art of appropriation, the use of quotation, inspiration, emulation, and the originality? Can we establish a chain between every art movement, artist and works that has developed since the primitive ages? When we look at the expressions produced by the cultures in the world, not just in terms of visual arts, can we claim that the history of religions is also an example of appropriation? Or can we take the example of the successive nation-state processes and the culture that nation-states produces as an example to the art of appropriation?
Zeki Faik İzer, one of the pioneers of modern Turkish painting symbolizes the appropriation idea from European modernism to newly established nation-state. He copies the Eugène Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People (1830) and paints The Road to Revolution (1933). He paints Turkey's (and the Turkey-like states) nation-state process with almost same forms. But he also localizes the painting by covering the chest of woman, putting her on a column of marble instead of barricades and placing Atatürk, the leader of Turkey into the painting. However, the artist also states that he does not embrace this picture in his later explanations. Almost an iconic status about the relationship of Turkish modernism with the artists.
Reproduction has a significant role in academic education. But what is the meaning of reproduction, besides technical exercise or training process? How is appropriation applied as an artistic production practice as a contemporary art method? Or, what does to receive, inspire, emulate, twist, select and reshare mean?
Ayfer Karabıyık likes using ready-made materials, communicating with the artists she is interested in and to get in touch with their work and art in her Borrowed Works series. She takes other artists works and turns these to other directions and tries to find out if any other possibilities. She makes a selection from his inventory and reinterprets it. However, Karabıyık also discusses the appropriation practice itself and looks at the alternatives of conventional means of appropriation.
Let's look at the other two works in Karabıyık's Borrowed Works series. She re-shoots artist Hito Steyerl's iconic How Not to Se Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File video by closing his eyes with his mobile phone. Karabıyık reinterprets Steyerl's understanding of visibility in the new media with her own visibility. Steyerl's video is actually gives reference tı the comedy group Monthy Python's video film mocking educational BBC film. These three jobs are linked together in a chain.
Karabıyık re-exhibits artists Burak Delier's video diary shot by his own cell phone Notes From My Mobile just changing the work's title. She makes a secondary reading of Delier's critique of the artist's need to create his aura and express himself through social media. As an artist opponent to the mainstream art practices, Karabıyık 's work overlaps with Delier's work. Karabıyık does not make "appropriation art", but she whirles the main and intermediate arteries of and openes new channels.
Ayfer Karabıyık invites both the artists she communicated with and the audience to a one-night stand in her "one night stand: one retention event". Karabıyık retains artist Rafet Arslan's drafts that produceed for a group exhibition. Karabıyık, who organizes the blog of that group exhibition, does not publish the drafts sent by Arslan. What we see in this night is the material that Arslan inspires, listens to and reads while working, and forms the basis of Karabıyık's exhibition.
The practices of transformation and reinterpretation in Karabıyık's works asks us questions about originality in contemporary art, interaction between artists and reinterpretation.
(Kültigin Kağan Akbulut)
one night stand - a retention event
26. April, 7.30pm
Sandershäuser Str. 79, 34123 Kassel