With performances, installations & video works by Cru Encarnação, Göksu Kunak, Maru Mushtrieva and Fette Sans
Being-With and Giving Time: Reflections on ShareHolders III by Alison Hugill
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Sharing is a social act and a model for economic behavior. Through sharing, we embed ourselves in the social fabric that surrounds us. It can be a mode of participating in the capitalist order – or an opportunity to resist it.
In the digital world sharing has become a metaphor we live by whereby some users turn what were once private intimate moments into public knowledge and commodities. As a consequence, one’s personal narrative becomes linked to vast social, artistic, and political dimensions of the virtual world.
ShareHolders is a three-part project curated by the interdisciplinary series Montag Modus about practices and politics of sharing. Its title refers to people who own shares in a company and therefore have a say in its affairs. By tweaking the word to separately emphasize “sharing” and “holding”, the project aims to confront this very phenomenon that is an integral element of capitalism, and endows its participants with an active role to critically expand on its constitutive elements.
The last edition of ShareHolders presents artists who question through autobiographically influenced works the collective conditions of shared realities and its blurred division between physical and online worlds.
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Fette Sans: The bitter ends of (the technologies of tenderness)
The bitter ends of (the technologies of tenderness) is a durational performance that reflects on the notion of absence. The work was created during the pandemic and speaks of displaced bodies, of bodies who can’t afford to lay down uninterrupted, of bodies that keep on being algorithmed to fit the politics of containment ideologies.
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Maru Mushtrieva: scratching the virtual off the skin while taking a selfie at the seashore
Off they go, the newly acquired rituals and artificial wisdoms. We are becoming a healed individual in three steps – detached from the world, detached from criticality, detached from care. A parallel universe ignores your surroundings, it documents and shares without seeing. The seashore is only visible through the screen of a totemic phone. In a search for communality we become one once again. We become the same one.
This sonic guided tour uses the intimate ear-space to reflect on the origins of rituals, the magic of embodiment pars pro toto and selfies as their twisted distant descendants.
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Cru Encarnação: The Ballad
A ballad is passed on orally throughout generations. As a narrative of unknown authorship it keeps itself alive through its collective (folkloric) dimension. It follows a semi-strict form and usually presents sentimental or romantic content, sung with the force of passion and honesty. The video-performance The Ballad brings up different questions of collective construction of the stories and rules - like science, knowledge and language –, which have immeasurably shaped our reality. The mysteries of their placement exist in a tension between fragility and power. How are these narratives and ideas holding us onto this shared reality and allow for our active participation? Their livelihood is generated by us and still they do exist to keep us alive.
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Video production: Sam W. Harper
Clothing and set design: Julieta Omil & biokimika2000solarpunk
Soundtrack: Odete
3D projections: Gabriel Massan
Göksu Kunak: AN(A)KARA and its ruins
"Humans are in no danger anymore. Yet, we, far away from the world, in AN(A)KARA, feeling the losses that accumulated, are lost. What (will have) made us safe (will have) made us grieve. Then, we asked ourselves which ones are the ruins: is it the space that we are in that is a was or the newness that is being performed (up)on it? Then, we watched the old trailers of my show: It’s a degenerated utopia, starring a confused conquerer, or a confused secular Muslim kid in the 90s, or a confused Orientalist, or a confused Eastern dad. (sigh). Good old days."
Welcome to a degenerated utopia, a ticket to a society between times, and the losses it entails. AN(A)KARA and its ruins is an installative version of the sci-fi TV variety show hosted by Gucci Chunk a.k.a. Göksu Kunak, that was first performed as an evening-length frontal piece at Sophiensaele. The performative installation explores Turkey's late modernity with a particular focus on the city of Ankara, and the bodies of the neoliberal TV hosts that are like monumental statues as they embody nationalist ideologies, serving as instruments of propaganda. AN(A)KARA aims at toppling the statue of the young and athletic NEW MAN and replacing it with shapewear underwear. The performative installation also explores the shift in a concept of time: from kısmet, the idea that fate predetermines a person's path, to the clocked fast pace of modernity and the friction in between.
In AN(A)KARA memories and confusions of a Muslim child appear as voices and objects speaking from a past of the 1980s and 1990s. While the performative installation gives an overview of this distinctive era of Turkey, Göksu Kunak simultaneously addresses the clichés and clashes about the East-and-West, the ever-present self-censorship, and the emotions around displacement that this reality generates.
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Curator & dramaturge: Léna Szirmay-Kalos
Curatorial assistance: Beatrice Zanesco
Producer: Magda Garlinska
Technic: Bátor Tóth & Hanna Kritten Tangsoo