The new exhibition, “Inventory,” focuses on state culture and its reflections on the lives of people.
Artists who realized their first astonishment concerning inventory stocks have come together in the same place to showcase their reactions.
“We decided to convey these feelings into their field of struggle and stand against inventory lists with their own lists,” said Tunca Subaşı, who created a work titled “Quilted.”
Combining the past and present, Subaşı made “Quilted” from cement. “The material depicts the inner meaning of the work,” he said.
Quilted is a large piece of inventory that used to be mounted on the walls of managers in Turkey.
“They usually use it behind the manager’s chair. In normal conditions it is made of leather and it is soft, but I used a hard material in making these pieces.”
For young artists, Inventory also explains institutions. That’s why Feza Velicangil chose to use a light box with lots of chairs on it. The work questions the status-symbolizing structure of inventories while offering the most qualified inventory furniture to the most senior members within a hierarchical structure that is inherent to all institutions in our lives including the family.
There are different media disciplines in the Inventory exhibition. For example Zeyno Pekünlü’s work “Doblethink-1” is a media art that focuses on the Turkish national anthem.
The work opens a new dimension of thought on the national anthem. Doblethink-1 suggests thinking differently about the 41-verse, 256-word national anthem, which Turkish students are obliged to sing every Monday morning and Friday evening.
Doublethink-1 consists of a poem composed with all the words of the anthem reordered alphabetically and of the first 256 images appearing as a result of searching for the term “Istiklal Marşı” on Google’s image search.
By doing this, Pekünlü also analyzes the anthem in terms of linguistics and semiotics. She combines the images and the words together.
In his work “Special Organization,” Erol Eskici develops an ironic rhetoric in terms of the dark periods, nightmares and relations of recent history. He introduces a periodic perspective in a way that the expression “pertain to” is used in the past tense.
“Inventory 1, 2, 3,” the title of Can Ertaş’s work at Sanatorium, may be a coded reference to the aspect of inventory at Turkish schools. The work is focused almost entirely on the act of drawing in different frames.
“I first considered using the frames all empty, as a reflection. But later on I decided to draw teachers and students in them. I started from the fact that during the decades of our education everything is changing in our school classes except the Turkish flag,” he said. The Atatürk portrait, the Turkish National Anthem, and the Address to Youth of Atatürk all changed in time and Ertaş deals with their symbolic meanings considering that their state is proportional to the permanence of the entity they present.
The Inventory exhibition at Sanatorium does not only define the codes of Turkish institutionalism. Guido Casaretto’s Halit Balil work depicts a story that took place in Verona, Italy.
In February 2007, Balil, the imam of Verona and a prominent representative of the Muslim community, applied to the Ministry of Education for the removal of religious symbols in classes on grounds that they were not in accordance with the secular principles of the state.
The intense dispute between the parties resulted in the declaration of the cross as an inventory by the Italian state. Starting from a real incident, he draws attention to the universal dimension of the mentality that turns inventory materials into objects of ideology and ideologies into inventory materials.
The exhibition Inventory questions institutes, the meaning of inventory both in state and non-state organizations and urges viewers to think and question the situation of a “person” in society.
The exhibition reveals that “just seeing is not believing” by discovering the sub-texts of inventories that we see in our daily lives and never care to understand the real meaning of.