Muge Akgun- What isn't what it seems to be: nature, objects, us?

Ani Celik Arevyan- There are many factors that affect and change what we see. An object can be misidentified even with the way it is lit because light changes its texture and form entirely. For example we look at the wall now and assume it is white because we lack to see a fly crashing into the wall right this instant and leaving a mark or fail to notice how the paint molecules change under sunlight. We don't actually know if the wall is white or in time perceive it differently with a change in our perspective. I introduced an idea using ordinary objects that we use within the natural environment we perceive. In other words, I shaped my composition using my clothes and the environment I exist within. I chose to convey this idea in the form of a fantasy tale because nothing is what it seems to be.

M.A- Is your work a reaction against how nature evolved?

A.Ç.A- No, not at all, because in my photographs nature sums up how we live. We see the reflection  of contradictions and parallels within that sum. Human forms of the clothes represent my mood. I sometimes include nature to draw attention to 'time' and, sometimes I use it to emphasize its effects it evokes in man. When I say time I mean the stretch of life that existed before us and that will exist after we are gone. For example in my case it's a voyage which started in 1961 and will end I don't know when.

M.A- The clothing and accessories used are they products of a special design?

A.Ç.A- I don't understand what you mean by design. These are clothes I have been using for years. They feel like an extension of my body. They are only used as tools to demonstrate my idea. It is not important if the clothes are especially designed or the trees maples of Central Park or beeches of  Belgrade Woods. I definitely have a huge respect for the designer or I wouldn't own a collection of 187 pieces in the past 20 years. So, it is only natural for me to chose an object that I identify myself with when I photograph my portrait.

M.A- Is it possible to call the exhibited photographs abstract? They all looked pretty concrete to me.

A.Ç.A- At first glance it's natural to perceive them to be concrete since the medium used is photography. Photography has to reflect images of real, concrete objects, technically. Abstract is what I want to say using photography as language, the sentence beyond the photograph.

M.A- Why did you chose such a concept?

A.Ç.A- Having a quick look at a crowded train moving very fast from the outside. Observing how the same event affects and gets interpreted differently by people. How things develop within basically a time span of known beginning and ending filled with happiness, ambitions, struggles, ideas of my own  can be sited as reasons.

The different perspective and the abstract language or approach seen in my photographs exist because, perhaps, I observe people from a different angle and I don't type cast them.

Pandora’a Box / Reflections

“One text reads another,” asserts the philosopher Derrida. This proposition evokes the possibility of a staggering infinitude of reflections, and it is more stimulating than the manifold replications of self one confronts if  located between two inward-facing mirrors. That is because when texts “read” each other so much unexpected may emerge. We might call this a sense of real depth, a sense of standing at the precipice.

Experiencing Ani Celik Arevyan’s photographs at the Istanbul Modern Museum I feel that I have really taken serious steps in that direction.

We observe a series of color photographs, each split horizontally along the middle. Traversing the top part of the photographs we notice  various pieces of clothing, handbags, accessories – all from a woman’s guard-robe,  pants standing upright or seated, blouses with a raised arm, clothes empty of person in carefully-conceived puppet-like, well-lighted poses.  All of the clothes and accessories are really interesting: post-modern, ultra-modern. It is as if the fabric of which they are made has not been cut at all; they remind one of the sculptural designs of the Japanese designer Issey Miyake. Vertical lines dominate.

In the bottom half of the photographs we observe nature set on its head, mostly sylvan scenes,  mostly topsy-turvy trees dominating, with their trunks, branches and leaves.

The depth created by the line of divide in the photographs is such that one gets the impression that, from a distance, the clothing could be a silhouette of skyscrapers.  Are we seeing the reflection of a city and its park in the very same body of water? Or is this the silhouette of New York, or Tokyo, or London from the vantage point of a central city park. Such are the fascinating illusions that confront the eye.

Are we observing reality in the lower or in  the upper part of the work?  It is almost as if that artificial silhouette in which the objects are standing, that strange fashion show bereft of life represents our consciousness and the scenes from nature below, our unconscious self. Which level is natural, which a construct? Have the spirit and the body been turned upside down? Are we examining the contradiction between countryside and city, between nature and culture?  The objects we have labeled as clothing are, in their weave, made of natural substances. Does nature not contain anything untouched by the human hand?

We find ourselves in the midst of a labyrinth. The upper and lower texts continue to read each other ad infinitum, as does that which they evoke, and as do the questions they direct at us. What we are confronting is not the reflection and counter-reflection of two objects. Rather, this is the reflection of a construct , the reflection (or, perhaps, at this point more suitably, refraction) as now re-constructed; and then that very same construction is reflected, once again. There is, indeed, no escape from this labyrinth. Perhaps that is why Ani Celik Arevyan has titled the exhibition “Nothing is as it Seems”. We are being forced to question our assumptions, our contradictions. Perhaps we are being reminded that though we take for granted that our preconceptions and habits are set on a solid foundation, we are indeed not on very solid footing.

I’m thinking that I’ll revisit this extremely successful, intellectually stimulating exhibition a few more times before it closes on 9 January 2011. I’ve been thinking about whether or not I’d be disturbed if I had one of those photographs on my wall at home and was dizzied by it on a daily basis. Then it occurred to me that my head is continuously in a spin from such labyrinth-like reflections in any case.

In one of his experiments from the 1980s Derrida divided a page in half and placed a sub-text, something like a subtitle, below the actual text. As one reads the piece it is easy to confuse the text and the sub-text, the distinctions between the primary and secondary texts. In fact, the two texts are continuously interconnected like a Mobius strip, but do not form an uninterrupted whole. While the lower strip subjects the upper one to an unceasing query, the upper strip appears to be estranging the lower one. Just like in Ani Celik Arevyans’s photographs. Just like in the reflection of my street from the window of the coffee shop. And now I understand; I seem to have forgotten that while I was playing a reality game with the reflection of my street, the street itself was actually such a construct.

For some time now I have been observing Istanbul, and, more than ever before, Turkey itself - all of life -  as a reality construct.  When I long for the depth of that construct we refer to as the three-dimensional world, then of course I need to be able to do something like touch and smell.  Though I can, if I wish, shift into a parallel construct, to the level of reflections.   

Stendhal referred to the novel as a mirror carried through the streets. I think he exaggerated a bit, but I can understand what he was after.

Because it is continuously reflected, reproduced, and separated into its components and then reconstituted, reality sometimes embraces us with all its force. It is only in such reflections that we are able to touch infinitude, being the essentially mortal creatures we are.

That is why we have a need for art.