VICIOUS CYCLE
What is identity? Who is what? I will not ask now “who I am” because I was asking that question all of my life. I made this project because of one fingerprint experience, actually it was ten finger prints!
I do not know why I got irritated this much when I gave my fingerprints for the first time in my life, however, everybody has an identity since the beginning of life and one paper will tell you all, what is your name, your father’s and mother’s name, where you were born and on which date, where your family is registered, are you a man or a woman, do you have any color and never ending numbers about your identity!
You have a number on your identity card but you never memorize it and you can not see it without looking on your identity card, so you can feel that your identity is only just a paper, therefore the first establishing of identity starts in life with an identity paper.
After, this paper is not enough for some people and you have to have different identities as a student, at the school, as a patient in hospital, a passport for travelling, a driving license, a bank card and when you get married you are wife of someone, when you have a baby you are a mother and when you get divorced you belong to no one, if you are in jail you are a criminal, if you have a job you are a worker and on and on it goes.
Identification never ends until the end of your life and you are imprisoned in this never ending system, you are always labelled as something, someone, even if you think you are nothing, after the system is not satisfied and demand your thin finger lines as proof, playing with my feelings as a sensitive person.
That is a real experience from my life, so in my works I am asking everything about myself, my experiences, aspects, past, culture, where I live at the moment, sometimes just for a second it becomes very minimalist, sometimes very complicated with expressions and drawing different medias from each other, considering the art academic situation also.
Naturally in my projects those questions brought new questions, and I started my project with a video art, but it turned into a book and after that book developed into some printmaking works and then those print works transformed into a moving sculpture within the same concept, so I ended up making four different projects with the same concept but with different medias.
When I started this project, I had a consultant, an opponent, two professors from my Intermedia and Conceptual Arts studio and a professor from the Visual Arts studio where I am studying as a foreign master student. I got very different critics and comments from all the professors about my project, sometimes they made me very confused, sometimes they made me very clear to think something up, but in the end, I decided to make four different projects for the four professors with the same concept.
When I am asking my identity within these four art works with my fingerprints, I am also asking to the contemporary art work’s identity as well, by this way I was asking to contemporary art multiplicity as a perception of artist and art viewers too.
Certainly, the identity is a very comprehensive topic in the contemporary art world, that’s why I tried to make my works inside borders, I started with a book and finished my works with a moving sculpture, and we can see there how the art works are interconnected, but also the art works sometimes destroy the meaning within the immanence of the work, and so we come to the vicious cycle! All four art works are asking how can you be a part of this system and how can you achieve autonomy!
I gave my fingerprints for the first time in my life in the British Embassy and then in the Czech foreign police two weeks after, that inspired me with strong feelings for my project.
I made a performance with a moving sculpture, using ten fingers on the moving platform and drawing some lines with the use of my fingers, this work was formed with my natural identity, the erratic long lines are part of me which can never be copied a second time, life is similar.
The second work is the printmaking works with using linocut technic in big dimensions. I used this traditional technic because just I wanted to make my finger print’s in print form and it is a kind of ironic point of view of this work for me. I used four fingers for this project which are my thumbs and index fingers, because I gave them as fingerprints in the Czech foreign police, I made them as large as possible using the maximum settings of the printmaking machine because I wanted to present them more clear and try and understand why these four fingers.
One of the art work’s is a book which has my fingerprints lines on each transparent paper, I drew my fingerprints one by one and wrote about my feelings in an ironic and humorous way.
“I just wanted to be a bird that time, birds can fly without a visa, there is no human being for birds who looks at your face and your photo bizarrely at the border. What happens if you look at a bird’s face, you just smile at the bird and say “go on fly” If you are a very warm hearted person, you give a kiss on the bird’s beak and just say goodbye, surely you do not say “stop, I need to stamp under your wings for passing through the border!
Yes, it was a nice feeling to be a bird, for unlimited visa and just to fly freely!”
DECIPHERED
“This book is dedicated to my dear mother and father who gave me my fingerprints.
Everything starts with something, there is a reason for everything, all will have a result one day anyway as expected! You draw some strange lines on papers, then one day you have to show them to someone. They do not understand anything that you have drawn, after that you convert it to a game and then your game turns back on you as a different game, you get bored from that, even you do not want to play it again but if you do not want to play it they want to take you into the game much more than before, after that you can not get out of the game.
Sometimes you feel choked up in the game, even when you are unable to breathe properly (which they do not know you are a person who has sarcoidosis and if they know about it, they think it is just another disease and who cares!...) Because they can not see your sensitive lungs and lines, even when someone wants to have those lines and the real story starts with that point, with fingerprint!
I think I would not believe that if someone told me that I will notice after 37 years I have beautiful and aesthetic fingerprint lines, especially I wouldn’t think I would be so excited to see the lines of my left thumbs which have unbelievable symmetrical shapes! This fact was relevant to me but it was not with the same feeling how I discovered potato peeling after 21 years. Then how I enjoyed and felt relaxed when cooking. So it is impossible for me to explain how I feel about my fingerprint lines and also how I feel uneasy with that! That’s why I started to draw my fingerprint lines, I already have them anyway and others also, therefore I could decipher them. Somehow I am my fingerprints and my fingerprints are me!”
(Above is a translation of 16 pages in the book)
The story of this book started with the long process to get a British, Irish and Czech Visa. I gave my fingerprints the first time in an official place and then decided to do this project with my experiences. I wrote it in Turkish language (which is my native language) to make it in my original poetic way and using humor of my own language.
Video art works also has fingerprint lines but in these works they started to dance because I started to enjoy this project in the time I was making it. The video has three parts with different dance and lines, there is an evolution between them presented as ‘infancy’, ‘evolving’ and ‘approved’, it is joined by a special original music which was made using fingers.
Looking deeper into this project you can see that a multidisciplinary artist has used different media with same concept.
When I started to make this project I was feeling something different but not in good way, after that I started to enjoy it and my feelings changed in a good way with the art works, so we can see how the power of art affects the human being or person, even when caught in the vicious cycle.