Ayse Erkmen's awesome.
Art
Impermanence
by Andrew Paul Wood
A fresh view of home from a Turkish-German visitor.
In March, Christchurch’s Physics Room coaxed a major figure in European contemporary art over for six weeks as part of its inaugural residency programme – and virtually nobody noticed, or at least it seemed that way from the lack of media attention. This was surprising, as Turkish-born, Berlin-based Ayse Erkmen is a highly significant artist, familiar in galleries, art spaces and biennials throughout Europe and North America. The result was a striking installation at the Physics Room last month.
Erkmen has said that she is “not interested in permanence. The fact is that I am afraid of permanent installations.” Her work is far more about the ephemerality of our experiences of place and identity, and her process (ideologically and artistically) is almost as the flâneur on a passeggiata – a matter of sampling and articulating personal impressions and meeting people, a sort of artistic tourism with a healthy inoculation of philosophical scepticism and aesthetic ambivalence. This is then used to transform a location into a distilled conceptual experience.
The installation is called awesome – an outsider’s surprise at the common enthusiastic New Zealand conversational response – and falls into two main parts. The larger gallery has been refurnished with translucent blinds in various soft colours (provided by a local company) and a narrow Dilana rug running across the floor (another local business). The rug is derived from Erkmen’s doodle of an endlessly looping line – a cipher for her intuitive process. The colours, dark brown on cream, resemble chocolate syrup swirled on a cappuccino. The carpet is a visual barrier bisecting the length of the space, but it also dares you to walk on it. There is the playful intimation that the gallery could, with little effort, be turned into an inner-city studio apartment.
The blinds are a direct engagement with the physical space of the gallery, particularly the large window overlooking the bustling cityscape of High and Tuam streets (including the vile bronze corgis of city-councillor whim – a pox on them all). The blinds infuse the space with ambient, lambent light in what might be a much simplified, mass-produced allusion to stained glass in a cathedral, but any sensation of tranquility is neutralised by the booming soundscape. The blinds also draw attention to what cannot be seen behind them: the view of the streets out to the Port Hills. This visual lacuna is rectified by having a video work (Level Two) of the outside playing in the gallery.
In the smaller back gallery is Scenic Overlooks. This consists of a looped slideshow of pretty-but-banal anonymous chocolate-box landscape shots from a commercial image database website, and although compiled in 2004, it has a resonance of appropriateness for New Zealand – or at least the “100% Pure”, Baudrillardian simulacra whored to sell tourism, wool and butter that has very little relationship to our reality. The postcard-like images unscroll and slowly reveal themselves, at choreographed variations of speed, with the poetic inexorability of the glacial modem connections of more primitive times – a little-considered aesthetic for experiencing images that has almost become extinct. But then, didn’t the internet put a gun to the head of regional “flava” and blow it away, or – as the sheer diversity of websites devoted to nationality and identity suggest – has it given it more mojo? Erkmen, an artist existing simultaneously in many worlds (Berlin and Istanbul especially) has offered Cantabrians a fresh sight of their turangawaewae.
AWESOME, Ayse Erkmen, Physics Room, Christchurch
