"The Project of Nurten Yüksel confronts the notion of peace in relation to ‘blindness’, It aims to recall the need of peace for international justice using brail signs, as a metaphor, pointing that the wisdom of peace is unreachable to humanity and blocked by the order of power.
We would like to reconsider Jose Saramago’s novel, ‘Blindness’, as a starting point.
In the novel, the lack of sight is demonstrated by one of the purest edge of modern art, the whiteness. The characters that lost their sight can only see the white color. Ironically this purest edge becomes the infection that prevents a common communication, between the human sense and the world, a hopeless epidemic of white gospel with no cure. The only person who didn't lose its sight and keeps the ability of reflection is a woman, the wife of the doctor.
Boris Groys argues that those structures of Irony became common structures of art. Modern and Contemporary art cannot embed a naive construction, as long it is not polemic or reflective. This area should contain a contradiction, a balance between the thesis and antithesis. Groys continue arguing that a perfect and radical balance delivers a form of political propaganda. Nurt en Yüksel confronts the notion of cognition to peace and its relevance to the world. She deals with polemic construction, between signifiers and brail signifies, using its white surfaces. This whiteness blocks any recognition of signs by any sense. The blind man cannot detect the signs after the act of flatting the surface, the trained eye cannot read ‘the white carpet ‘and gain the wisdom of peace.
Maybe a proper example to this act, in vise versa, is Bruce Nuaman’s 'Corridor' where the mathematical order between the subject and the filmed object deliver unreachable communication.
The intention to block any recognition of signs gains two things. The first one is obvious and related to Barthes ‘Mythologies’: the linguistic construction of signs transforms into new signifies and by that deliver a new linguistic construction that becomes a myth. The second one is where the project success to enter to its reflection stage and the author expose the contradiction between our knowledge and myths.
Tamara Moyzes
Artist, activist and curator, Prague 2013"