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Do you dig Turkish psychedelic rock 'n' roll? Well you will after watching BaBa ZuLa's video for "Baska Bir Alem"—which translates as "Another World." There's something very sinuous and sensual about the grooves this duo ride throughout. Inspired as much by modern rock as Pre-Islamic Turkish music, BaBa ZuLa incorporate darbuka, electric saz, and spoons with electronics, alongside more traditional instruments (guitar, drums). The result is a rich tapestry of aural textures.

Meanwhile, the video—premiering above and directed by Asli Baykal—is a visual feast. A celebration of Turkish ladies through song and dance, Baykal's women of all ages traverse green plains, twirl in fields, and shimmy in forests, decked out in vibrant garb. All that maximalist haute-boho-hippy crap you see on catwalks currently? Fuggedaboutit. If you want an image overhaul, take inspiration from this: Metal headpieces twinkle in the sun; colors and patterns clash with giddy alacrity. Let this be your jumping off point into a whole other realm.

Source: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/65z3d3/baba-zula-video-for-baska-bir-alem-57a206bf83f767df43646bfc

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2YKA-FLoAU

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 Medina Wasl: Connecting Town 16mm film transferred to video, 2018, color, sound, 31 min

Artist: Gelare Khoshgozaran

As a film project, Medina Wasl: Connecting Town glances at the history of orientalist traditions, landscapes and imagination, as it has developed and persisted over time in the California Mojave desert, and as the lineage of today’s militarization of the Middle East. The introduction of date palm to the US around 1902, led to the Indio Date Festivals of the 1940s-1980s—a tradition continued today as “The Riverside County Fair and Date Festival” with Sahara Trails, Caravansaries, Camel and Ostrich Races, and Arabian Night Pageants. Only a short drive from Indio are several simulacra of Middle Eastern towns at U.S. military training centers. Through the lens of Said’s Orientalism, the project studies the role and history of fiction and speculation in the constructs of the Middle East, and the continued violence enacted through conflating languages, landscapes, cultures and geographical territories in relation to the War on Terror. Medina Wasl: Connecting Town was shot in the small towns of Mecca and Thermal, CA, as well as US the Fort Irwin National Military Training Center or “The Box.” Also known as “Little Afghanistan” or “Medina Wasl,” The Box houses multiple Middle Eastern combat towns, providing simulated battlefields in a climate resembling that of Iraq’s. Originally build during the invasion of Afghanistan, “Medina Wasl” is a “Middle Eastern” town donning the Afghan flag on its multiple buildings, whose name desperately translates to “Connecting Town” in Arabic. Dressed as an Iranian soldier from the war with Iraq, I documented the areas in the California Desert that have been historically built to resemble the Middle East for industrial, militarized and entertainment purposes, while all three inseparable, overlapping and interwoven. The footage is overlaid with oral interviews I have conducted with U.S. war veterans about their memories of the landscape in the different parts of the Middle East where they were deployed. In this way, the film is intended to blend fiction and reality, dream and waking life as testimony to continued violence. It creates a surreal collage connecting the two regions across the decades through war and colonialism, while the palm tree continues to link my visual memories of the war-torn Shatt al-Arab (during the Iran-Iraq war) to the militarized Southern California desert.

Credits Written and edited by: Gelare Khoshgozaran Additional camera operator: Dicky Bahto Field recording and sound design: Jimena Sarno Voice recording and mixing: Christopher Cole Colorist: Caitlin Díaz Film processing and digital transfer: FOTOKEM Music for dream sequence: Omid Walizadeh Music for dance sequence: “Ahvaz” by Makan Ashgvari Voice-over excerpts selected from interviews with Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans: River Rainbow O’Mahoney Hagg, Lou, Kasey, Julien Bellin, James, Eddie Voices: Devin Clark, Tyler Connaghan, Sally Glass, Derek Sasco Thanks to: Gosia Herc-Balaszek, Hillary Mushkin, Perry Supa, Eliot Yasumura, The Echo Park Film Center, The Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant and The Hammer Museum Further research and writing: Terrorientalist Landscapes Between You and Me: a Conversation with Dan Bustillo

Image Credit: Gelare Khoshgozaran, installation view, Made in L.A. 2018, June 3 – September 2, 2018, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Photos: Brian Forrest Medina Wasl: Connecting Town, stills. Courtesy Gelare Khoshgozaran

Source: https://gelarekhoshgozaran.com/VISUAL/Medina-Wasl-Connecting-Town

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eye five eight nine: application for asylum and for withholding of removal | 2016

Gelare Khoshgozaran  letterpress prints on cotton paper, 13 in x 16 in, edition of 5 Letterpress (blind impressions) of the twelve pages of the artist's form i-589 Application for Asylum and for Withholding of Removal submitted to the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services in 2012. In their multitude and "blindness" the prints address the invisibility of the labor of asylum seeker/immigrant in an encroaching quest for legibility within a reductionist system of paper(work). Using text from the U.S. immigration forms, i-589 "Application for Asylum" and i-485 "Application to Register Permanent Residence or Adjust Status," mm/dd/yyyy questions the formation of the alien subject in the U.S. through asylum and immigration procedures. What is expected to "swear to, under perjury of law" in the literature of these forms? What are the criteria for eligibility, authenticity and legibility of the prospective U.S. citizen? And how do these questions reflect onto the (naturalized) U.S. citizens by birth or through immigration?

Source: https://gelarekhoshgozaran.com/VISUAL/eye-five-eight-nine-2016 

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Hande Sever When the Geraniums Bloom

On September 12, 1980, before dawn, a right-wing military junta led by General Kenan Evren took state power in Turkey. Leveraged by the Carter administration, the military coup established martial law, abolished civil rights, and ruled the country for the next three years. During this time, the Turkish Armed Forces persecuted millions from the Turkish student movement, whose members sought to end national oppression through social reform. As a result, the military arrested 750,000 people; blacklisted 1,683,000; tried 230,000 in 210,000 lawsuits; sentenced 7,000 to death; revoked the citizenship of 17,000 and denied the right of 388,000 from obtaining a passport.

When the Geraniums Bloom is an exhibition by artist Hande Sever, who recalls her mother’s experience of the coup d'état through plants, soil, and compost. During that time, prisons were synonymous with torture centers – the most notorious of which were Metris, Diyarbakır and Ulucanlar. The artist’s mother was kept in the Metris Military Prison – now known as Metris Closed Penitentiary. While incarcerated, Sever’s mother planted beans as a reminder of the outside world and of her life before incarceration, where she tended geranium plants on her balcony. Through her mother’s narrative, Sever’s exhibition examines the state of exception that confined the outdoor activity of gardening to an indoor space, while unearthing historical events that led to the poetic implications and symbolism of the geranium flower within the Turkish Student Movement. Sever brings together the complexities of botanical symbolism and its influence on Turkish poetry, while revealing its shifts in meaning brought upon by the US intervention in Middle Eastern politics during the Cold War.

A research based artist working across media – notably video, performance and sound – Hande Sever was raised in Istanbul, Turkey and received an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in Valencia, CA. Informed by interdisciplinary processes, her works often take up her family’s history of persecution to explore divergent lines of inquiries, including issues of exile and post-coloniality. Her work has been included in exhibitions and screenings at Hauser & Wirth in Somerset, UK; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Human Resources and the BOX Gallery in Los Angeles, CA. Sever has published with the Getty Research Journal, Journal of Arts & Communities, Hayal Perdesi, 5Harfliler and Hauser & Wirth. She is currently a member of the collective residency at NAVEL Los Angeles and teaches at CalArts as part of the Photography and Media Program.

Source: Visitor Welcome Center

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Left: the photograph of Nusaybin, Turkey, after military forces destroyed it. Right, Dogan’s painting from 2016.

Source: https://news.artnet.com/art-world/almost-three-years-prison-outspoken-artist-zehra-dogan-released-turkish-prison-1473943

In 2017, a digital tablet drawing Doğan made depicting the destruction by Turkish security forces of the Kurdish City of Mardin in the Nusaybin district landed her in prison over charges of propaganda. The painting portrays Turkish military operations that targeted approximately 30 towns and neighborhoods and displaced between 355,000 and 500,000 people, mostly of Kurdish origin. The work, based on an official photograph of these events distributed by the Turkish military, shows the heavy toll inflicted upon Nusaybin, a predominately Kurdish area of Turkey. For the painting, Doğan was charged and subsequently spent over two years in prison.

Source: https://hyperallergic.com/486421/artist-and-journalist-zehra-dogan-released-from-turkish-jail-after-nearly-three-years/

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Prison Paintings is a series of fifteen paintings in acrylic on paper made by the Turkish artist Gülsün Karamustafa between 1972 and 1978. Displayed all together or in smaller groups, the works present an emotive sequence of images showing women of all ages in prison settings. They are painted in bright bold colours in a quasi-naïve style. The sombre subject matter draws on the artist’s personal experience of being incarcerated in Turkey in the early 1970s. Following the military coup of 1971 Karamustafa, who was a member of the 1968 generation and a politically active student during her university years in Istanbul, was arrested and sentenced to six months in prison for aiding and abetting political activists. The Prison Paintings were painted from memory, after the artist had been released from an institution intended for female prisoners serving life sentences. She has explained her motivation in making the paintings: ‘I made them in order to remember, in order to be able to keep [what happened] in mind. After serving time in the Maltepe, Selimiye and Sağmalcılar prisons in Istanbul, I was sent to Izmit Prison to be with the ones sentenced to penal servitude for life.’ (Quoted in Rumeysa Kiger, ‘Artist Gülsün Karamustafa fulfils promise in major SALT Beyoğlu exhibition’, Today’s Zaman, 20 October 2013, http://www.todayszaman.com/arts-culture_artist-gulsun-karamustafa-fulfills-promise-in-major-salt-beyoglu-exhibition_329239, accessed 4 March 2016.)

The Prison Paintings were not exhibited until 2013 when they were included in Karamustafa’s retrospective at SALT, Istanbul. For many years, the artist had been unwilling to show this body of work, due to her reluctance to revisit this difficult period in her life. She also did not want to be seen to be exploiting her experience and the friendships she made in prison; eventually, however, she was able to present the work as an homage to the lives of the women alongside whom she had been incarcerated.

Tate: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/karamustafa-prison-paintings-16-t15195

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At 27, Ooloosie Saila is among the youngest of emerging Inuit artists with Feheley Fine Arts. As a child, she was inspired to draw through occasional visits to the home of her friend’s grandmother, celebrated artist Kenojuak Ashevak. These visits facilitated an environment where Saila would cultivate drawing skills and a sharp eye for the bold use of colour and composition which now characterizes her work, as well as an understanding of the importance of hard work and perseverance. Saila continues to explore many diverse themes and ideas in her work, with a recent focus on northern landscape and wildlife.

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Artists: Kiki Salem and Saj Issa 

Source: Cut and Paste

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A Kind of Return brings together projects by Bishara Elmi and Luther Konadu that offer nuanced reflections on interpersonal relationships within Black communities. Konadu is an Winnipeg-based photographer who takes self-portraits and photographs of close friends and loved ones. The resulting images present the subjects on their own terms, and challenge dehumanizing representations that have long been associated with the Black body in photography. Elmi is a Toronto-based artist who addresses the tension between displacement and belonging within relationships, particularly as it relates to the Black queer and trans experience. Through installation and photography, Elmi’s work argues that the experiences of exile and marginalization can occur within the context of a relationship, not just from a physical location.

At their core, both projects ask: What role can relationships serve for those living in oppressed conditions? How do those individuals find each other and build community? Elmi and Konadu explore their truths of what this means culturally and systemically, while complicating stereotypical and narrow representations of Black communities.

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Aylin Zaptcioglu’s narrative and dream-like pieces. 

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Justin Favela

Fridalandia. 2017. paper, glue and found objects. Installation

Denver Art Museum 

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Justin Favela is one of 13 artists creating installations at the Denver Art Museum for Mi Tierra: Contemporary Artists Explore Place.

As a lifelong resident of Las Vegas, Justin Favela has been influenced by the cultural mash-ups so prevalent there. The pastiche of architectural styles and historical references serves as a launch pad for his studio practice. He notes that there are generations, or layers, of appropriation in his hometown: the Venetian casino complex and its furnishings are based on tourist images of Venice, while its structure encompasses shopping malls and slot machines, among other things, none of which exist in the Italian city.

With piñatas as stylistic inspiration, Favela critiques stereotypes by assessing their absurdities and then exaggerating them. In Denver’s installation, Favela looks to Mexican artists José María Velasco (1840–1912) and Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) to invite us into a dialogue about home and identity. For Fridalandia, Favela created a massive mural using piñata paper based on paintings by Velasco and other Mexican colonial artists. This landscape serves as a backdrop for a re-creation of Frida Kahlo’s Casa Azul patio garden, as captured in Julie Taymor’s 2002 film Frida. Favela questions perceptions about Mexico and the Americas, translating so-called high art through his use of craft materials to critique imagined symbols of Mexicanidad.

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Nil Yalter: Off the Record

As a Marxist-feminist and an immigrant herself, Yalter focuses extensively on the subject of immigration. She documents the struggles of migrant workers, through objects, visuals and video interviews that she collected using ethnographic methods. Off the Record brings together a selection of works from the artist’s "Temporary Dwellings" (1974–76), "Immigrants" (1976–2016) and "Exile is a Hard Job" (1983) series, which are chosen for the context of Istanbul and the specificities of the exhibition space. Beyond their significance as historical documents, these works are also flexible, permeable, and multilingual fictional spaces that allow the audience to observe different points of view.

Yalter’s first work to directly address a political subject, Deniz Gezmiş (1972) is about the execution of three young revolutionaries following the coup by memorandum in 1971. Described by Yalter as an “act of presence” this work was first realised in a room in Istanbul, then in Paris by creating the same setup. Deniz Gezmiş embodies the moral reflex of an artist compelled to respond to the urgencies of her time. The work meets with audiences for the first time in this exhibition.

Also among the works in the exhibition are La Roquette, Women’s Prison (1974), recounting the story of Mimi, an inmate in the prison located in the 11th arrondissement of Paris; Le Chevalier d’Éon (1978), the portrait of a middle-aged person who shifts between two genders throughout his life; and Harem (1979–80), which focuses on the sexually charged relationship between two concubines amidst the splendour of Topkapı Palace. In these works that subvert traditional subject-object relationships and ingrained gender categories, desire manifests as the power of repudiating oppression in disciplinary systems.

(e-flux, arter) 

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Harem  

Black & White video 42″ 

Nil Yalter (1979)

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Turkish Immigrants (Series)

Nil Yalter (1977)

Photographs and drawings on Turkish immigrant workers and their families in Paris 

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Rahime, Kurdish Woman from Turkey

Nil Yalter /Nicole Croiset (1979)

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Gottfried Haider

This assemblage consists of "found objects" found in the source code of the Linux kernel, the underlying piece of machinery that enables all different ways people use their computers. I was interested in learning about the mental concepts embedded in the textual source.

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Image: Funny Hunt 2016

ELİF BİRADLI ‘THIS IS STUPID’ 22.12.2016 – 21.01.2017

“The artist utilizes various media for the works in the exhibition, including photographs, paintings, sculptures and installations, masterfully constructing visual and auditory images. In her works, Elif Biradlı brings together limbs separated from human bodies with ordinary objects with a darkly humorous method, looking inside herself to inspect society and its depths.

In her works, which are constructed entirely on synthetic objects, we encounter grotesque masks, single-use plastic utensils from ordinary life and exaggerated colors that drag the viewer into gleaming darkness, in the stifling intermediate spaces between subject and object. Male and female images on the verge of passing each other on an eerie aesthetic plane, revealing a persona that had hidden itself.

In Biradlı’s works, the viewer is confronted with birth as a bloody ceremony, the first step towards death. The artist traces rebirth in the cycle of societal gender, produced as a diseased answer to the fears seeping out of the collective subconscious.

As a modern conceptualization against the fear of death, the artist looks at the absurdity of existence, defining each scene constructed in her works as a tragic “piece of the joke” ‘This Is Stupid’ buzzes in the ears like a dark guffaw, inviting viewers to an experiment in disappearance that is as eerie as it is carefree and as terrifying as it is humorous.”