In 1919, Sigmund Freud revealed the essay “The Uncanny” as an exploration of aesthetics, through which he admitted from the beginning was not his explicit subject as a psychoanalyst. Nonetheless, he ventured forth into issues of literal definition. The phrase “arouses dread and creeping horror,” he decided, though distinguishing it from the “fearful” by mentioning its underlying ambiguity as an idea that runs counter to the elegant, however which impacts the identical psychological area.
Hale Tenger, a budding grasp of the environmental set up, invitations folks right into a window of footsore curiosities on the Mısır Residence on İstiklal Avenue, whereby the dice of Galeri Nev Istanbul is match with a sequence of movies and sculptures whose mediums merge, and challenge overlapping volumes of sunshine the colour of fields, waters and skies. Her muse is a poem by Edip Cansever, an vintage seller and naturalist of the Second New literary wave.
By the point Freud confessed his ignorance on the subject of aesthetics, he had already authored not less than 12 books and was poised to crystallize his idea on the loss of life drive as a psychological precept equal in significance to that of the impetus to life, what he equated with the workings of the libido, a modus of pondering for which he’s greatest identified. The intuition to disintegrate, Freud conjectured, is also understood because the Nirvana precept.
To sure interpretations of Buddhist philosophy, karma is symbolized as a gust of wind and is usually synonymous with motion.
An individual’s karma is just what they do. However reaching perfection, in that custom of metaphors, or in that mythology, is conceived as a windless state the place even atop the summit of an ideal peak, the air remains to be. Cansever, writing between offers on the Grand Bazaar, got here to an analogous conclusion in his poetics.
“There’s a place the place the winds relaxation / The resting winds, take a break,” wrote Cansever in the course of his poem, “The place the Winds Relaxation,” which impressed Tenger to serenade a clean artwork house with crosshatches of shadow below an aquamarine luminescence emit from an oval-shaped video projection, likened to the spherical lookout holes throughout the hull of ships for these in guidance to see phosphorescent shocks of biology within the blue depths.
“Cherries, waters, mirrors” (2019) units a surreal tone, with its pastiche of plastic media, together with bronze, copper, marble and glass. In its personal nook, a gleaming inexperienced shifting picture exhibits an underwater scene through which an inanimate object, or lifeless creature, lies on a mattress of water greens. The otherworldly approximates to actuality, as lived expertise in nature, which Tenger artfully captures within the body of her exhibition.
THE UNKNOWN EARTH
The sound of propelling followers is a tool considerably employed by Sarkis to create an environment at his historic set up, Çaylak Sokak at Arter’s “What Time Is It?” group present, which Tenger additionally used when she first approached Cansever’s poem in 2007. The strains, “Did not we pull the physique out from underwater / We did not pull the physique out from underwater” seem towards the tip of “The place the Winds Relaxation.” Over the course of 12 years, Tenger didn’t waver from replicating the poem’s title in her artworks, nor from investigating its inside meanings.
The strains, which repeat themselves to dramatic impact, fluctuate with slight adjustments to the verbal conjugation, sharpening Freud’s concentrate on his psychological etymology of the uncanny. The outdated mental lion discovered it essential to conjure up an uncanny sensation in himself earlier than writing about it in an authoritative sense. “The place the Winds Relaxation” is an experiment in conjuring such a sense, a robust one that’s putting for its model of familiarity that isn’t wholly desired, however that, within the language of Freud, creeps up on one.
Within the marble sink affixed to a wall at Galeri Nev Istanbul for “The place the Winds Relaxation,” the bronze cherries therein enchant for his or her static presence alone, summoning the powers of the creativeness. The inside is suffused with delicate darkness sufficient to accent such touches as lucid movies of gleaming waves cutout into a dangling mirror. Beside it, the floor of a round monitor ripples like a relaxed puddle into which a deer gazes, at peace in its forest residence. The piece is somewhat poetically titled “Magic is the mirror of a deer” (2019).
The deer is a robust image in Turkish literature and the nation’s cultural historical past, utilized by the late Ottoman poet Ziya Gökalp to specific trendy pan-Turkic nationalism, or when the folkloric landscapes of Central Asia hyperlink with Anatolia by means of fantasies of its fauna. The 13th-century mystic humanist Haji Bektash Veli, a recent of Rumi, seems to followers as a deer. Many consider it to the extent that they refuse to hunt deer out of precaution. Moreover, it’s the Hittite motif of a long-antlered deer encircled by a hoop of bronze that was taken up by Turkey’s capital of Ankara.
TO COME UP FOR AIR
However the energy of the present and its most affecting components are a pair of vinyl screens that waft gently as its centerpiece. Ethereal and transcendent, the tranquil temper that Tenger has created has a semblance along with her work for the 16th Istanbul Biennial, one of many strongest installations of town’s flagship artwork occasion. Her voice might be heard whispering a nature poem as swimming pools of water had been mirrored in opposition to obsidian discs and the horizon from the isle of Büyükada.
Tenger evokes the pacifying Nirvana precept inherent not solely in human psychology however all through creation. That the world has the tendency to be at peace, to dissolve itself of ego and predominance holds a present of being that’s as obscure to the attention as it’s palpable to the guts. In related regard, essayist Bolesław Micińsky sought to render visuality in phrases together with his piece, “Portrait of Kant,” which in 1994, Tenger additionally tailored into an artwork piece.
“The division of the humanities into ‘spatial’ and ‘temporal’ belongs to one of the crucial fascinating chapters within the historical past of aesthetics,” wrote Micińsky in 1979 for The Polish Overview, echoing considerations raised over half a century earlier by Freud. Micińsky primarily examines the fuzzy psychological boundary the place sensations acquired through synthetic media coalesce right into a similitude of full-body immersion, recreating the uncanny feeling that arises when what’s seen is felt as remembered, with out recalling having had the precise expertise.
With acute temporal consciousness, Tenger self-references her works, their conceptual and bodily options, amply deviating from previous efforts in order to stay progressive. The black reflective pool curated in opposition to the longest wall at Galeri Nev Istanbul is grown with metallic shoots of herbs, through which strains of Cansever’s poem surge patiently up by means of the shallow liquid vessel paying homage to her piece on the biennial.
And biking up her 2007 set up after “The place the Winds Relaxation,” she indicators off with a query mark, an uncanny open ending to a macabre scene, “Did not we pull the physique out from underwater / We did not pull the physique out from underwater.” The poem and its artwork emerge from underwater, as a physique left to float earlier than sinking down once more into its unique obscurity.