Those who would enter the third floor of Arter this month can smell boiling milk and then witness a large table, with a boiling milk in the middle of it. Milk is boiling and turning its surface turning into a cream. This is work of Deniz Gül, young Turkish contemporary artist, from her first and new exhibition titled “5 Person Bufet.”
This photo shows the boiling milk in the middle of the exhibtion area. (Photo by Cemal Emdem)
The exhibition “is a multi-phase project that started out with a text Deniz Gül wrote to be performed by 5 people. In the text, Deniz Gül has opened a linguistic memory to the voices and performances of 5 characters embodied in 5 pieces of furniture, using words that she could remember from media, from the streets and from her inner voice—words mostly deformed through the filter of memory. The text of Gül is a short two curtain play.
Gül chooses to use strong words as she creates the dialogues. She makes the reader to feel like there is more in the words. The sounds, the chaos, hatred, love, the puissance of the society reflect to the text.
Gül gathers all these denominators and add the meaning of her words in text of this theater play. Those words are also a part of these five furniture that she created for this exhibition. The furniture of the “5 Person Bufet” installation (Vitrine, Closet, Safe, Coffin and a Door turned into a room) is lined up in the exhibition space to welcome the audience, to create a new ‘outside’ with their own ‘inside’ for those stepping in through half open doors. As loud as the text is, the furniture is just as silent in turn.
Gül’s furniture, made of rose tree, reveal the liberated sound and language that she used in her text.
The project’s main body now is shaped by the furniture installed in the exhibition space and the window glasses Gül frames the space with, thus rendering visible a feeling that was first expressed in language.
The five pieces of furniture symbolize people, said Gül speaking during the opening of the exhibition.
The theater play focuses on an area of power, sexuality, ritual and religion.
Even though this exhibition seems like closely related to the dialogues, it is also possible to scrutinize the furniture without focusing on the text.
These 5 pieces of furniture, which meet the audience facing the window (their backs to the viewer), create a new outside within the exhibition space with a layout recalling buildings lined up on a street. These pieces of furniture, which the artist intervened their interior with the help of some objects and material, yet made almost no changes on their appearance, represent nothing but themselves at first glance.
As Gül places the furniture as her own monument-objects at the centre of the installation, she opens up a space fostered by the tension between the outside and the inside and the transitivity between them. For instance, the cut glass motifs inspired by glassware that are usually displayed on vitrines and applied to the windows serve to expand the ‘interior’ to the ‘outside’, the private to the public.
What is milk got to do with the exhibition?
The table that Gül created with boiling milk in the middle employs a quite unusual duty. This is a platform of dialogue for her furniture.
She is inspired by the fountain pools in public domain, this large and round table enchants the entire space while the milk boiling at its centre thickens and spreads its scent all over the furniture as the day wears out.
“Everyone gathers around a fountain or a water side,” said Gül. This is a platform to tell ideas and maybe to feel the dominancy of one character on another.