Challenging Orientalism Pt. 2

Playlist

Six international curators from the Norient community have researched contemporary music videos that re-imagine, parody, or deconstruct Orientalism. The final selection is presented in the virtual exhibition «DisOrient: Welcome to the Hall of Mirrors», which is part of the German festival Mannheimer Sommer. Here is the shortlist by curator and designer Basak Senova, who focuses on videos from Türkiye.

Music: Ceza
Video: Esen Entertainment
Track: Türk Marşı (Türkiye, 2012)

Around 1783, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart composed the «Piano Sonata No. 11 in A major» (K. 331/300i) in three movements and, inspired by Ottoman military bands, he titled the last movement «Alla turca». In 2012, Turkish artist Ceza was rapping over the Turkish march by Mozart (1783) with non-traditional beats. Ottoman military bands had a specific style of walking that eventually became an idiom in Turkish culture: «two steps forward and one step back». Ceza’s lyrics question progression in society and politics, while the clip challenges the circulation of the clichéd images between two mentally static poles: the East and the West (read more in this commentary on the video).

Music: Korhan Futacı feat. Haluk Bilginer
Video: Korhan Futacı
Track: ah güzel kafam (Türkiye, 2020)

Featuring the internationally acclaimed actor Haluk Bilginer, this clip takes place in the narrow streets of Cihangir, the bohemian and diverse neighbourhood in Istanbul. The clip brings all the possible schizophrenic messages and images together. The song also inserts the sound of zurna (a wind instrument from central Eurasia) along with saxophone. By replacing images of the Gezi Park protests with images of vegan propaganda, the clip talks about the post-Gezi trauma by disguising it with a state of being high.

Music: Ayben
Video: Atıf Ülkü
Track: Başkan (Türkiye, 2017)

This rap clip was dedicated to violently silenced women. It criticizes the governing politics and indifference of the society. Furthermore, the clip uses all of the possible Orientalist and mainstream clichés together to form a genre-based provoking visual language: belly dancers, zil, zurna, cheerleaders, çengi, boxers, fancy cars, etc.

Music: Palmiyeler
Video: Mertcan Mertbilek
Track: Derine (Türkiye, 2018)

This animated clip was produced by the members of the band and depicts a non-linear narration through characters extracted from tarot cards. Promoted as «tropic and psychedelic pop, bringing serious lyrics darkened by Istanbul’s genuine chaos», the clip uses tarot decks originating from 18^th century Europe.

Music: Gaye Su Akyol
Video: İnan Tuncay
Track: İstikrarlı Hayal Hakikattir (Türkiye, 2019)

This clip uses all of the kitsch signifiers and the visual manifestations of Arabesk culture of the 1990s in Türkiye. With the process of internal migration during the 1980s and 1990s, cultural productions were generated in this culture as a reaction against a nationalist-state dependent on Western paradigms.

This playlist has been compiled in the context of «DisOrient: Welcome to the Hall of Mirrors». A virtual music video exhibition by Norient for Mannheimer Sommer (July 12–22, 2020). Because of the Corona pandemic, the festival took place as a virtual event.

Biography

Basak Senova is a curator and designer. She studied literature and graphic design (MFA in graphic design and Ph.D. in art, design and architecture at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey) and attended the 7th curatorial training program of Stichting De Appel, Amsterdam. Currently, she is a visiting professor at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna. Senova has been writing on art, technology, and media, initiating and developing projects and curating exhibitions since 1995. She is one of the founding members of NOMAD, as well as the organizer of «ctrl_alt_del» sound art project. Follow her on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, or on her Website.

Links

Basak Senova: «Reading the Turkish March from Ceza» (Norient)

Published on June 19, 2020

Last updated on June 27, 2023

Topics

Protest

Music Video

All Topics

Special

DisOrient

Snap

print as pdf

3 views from the CrossSections_intervals Exhibition at Kunsthalle Exnergasse. (Photo: Matthias Bildstein & Basak Senova, Vienna 2018)

A Curatorial Technique: Devising Process and Improvisation

Short Essay

by Basak Senova

Curating exhibitions has often been a one-dimensional endeavor. Here, the curator Basak Senova suggests an approach that prioritizes constant feedback between artists and audience, as well as improvisation.

In the light of spatial, social, economic, health, and climate-related urgencies, I started developing the CrossSections project in 2017, taking into consideration multiple questions regarding curatorial techniques in exhibition making. CrossSections is a collective interdisciplinary platform reflecting on artistic research, dialogs, and production. Between 2017 and 2019, through my curatorship, 19 artists and nine institutions shared their realities, conditions, and strategies through residencies, educational programs, exhibitions, performances, and book launches in Vienna, Helsinki, and Stockholm. The project devised a specific model of exhibition making by mapping and manifesting diverse artistic methodologies and models of collaborative engagement and commitment, under constantly evolving conditions and terms.

Constant Feedback

In the course of the project, a set of exhibitions arose through sketches of ideas, questions, and experiments; the project spontaneously absorbed all that emerged. For me, it was a discursive act. I accommodated and supplied a range of artistic research findings, methods, and activities by using the exhibitions as a space for feedback. Each exhibition and activity traced the form and the process of the previous ones, generating a flow and connection between them. This design allowed for overlapping experiments and dialogs between the works through both cross and parallel references. Content migrated between exhibitions.

By taking all possible approaches detected in the artists’ working processes – with their similarities and divergences – CrossSections aimed to communicate not just the end result, but also the potentials of the research as the artwork. Since I understand exhibition making as a process of «designing the perception of the audience», audiences’ feedback and responses played an important role in shaping the presentation of the exhibitions.

A model of exhibition making was collaboratively constructed, while process- and condition-based conversations took place among the artists, the curator, the institutions, the works, and the audience. Each exhibition started with my designed plan, which could be collaboratively alterated in situ to create spatial efficiency, navigation routes, and views with different perspectives among the works. The works in the exhibitions were not sequential, but rather scattered.

Welcoming Spontaneity

The curation was based on drawing connections in the space based on content and form. While setting up the exhibitions, I welcomed spontaneous collective decisions and interventions. In this way, the audience could later navigate effortlessly through the diverse content and media in each exhibition. For instance, Egyptian artist Heba Y. Amin detected and highlighted techno-utopian visions that have been reinforced by the conflicts over, and dictatorial policies regarding, oil, resources, and power in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Benji Boyadgian, from Jerusalem, reflected on the memory value of an obscure ancient Roman aqueduct in Jerusalem, attempting to write the story of this second aqueduct through drawings and moving images. In parallel, through a dialogical collaboration with Behzad Khosravi Noori, he narrated and fictionalized archival material relating to three clock towers in Iran and Palestine, connecting them to colonial history, architecture, and Middle Eastern geopolitics.

The South African artist Bronwyn Lace captured, with time-lapse images, a colony of African carrion beetles feasting on the body of an owl in the basement of the Natural History Museum in Vienna. Manipulation of this footage resulted in a multimedia installation; a sound component, created collaboratively by South African composers and vocalists, meditated on the sounds of mourning. British artist Tamsin Snow, meanwhile, approached the recognition of after-death by combining sightings from artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, and cryogenics through CGI animations. CrossSections’ way of exhibition making articulated paths of artistic research and knowledge by giving an insight into the working methods of the artists and their work using different media. In this way, the exhibitions generated additional knowledge about the collaborative process behind the project.

This text is part of Norient’s Online Special «Politics of Curatorship», published in the context of the Norient Film Festival 2022.

Biography

Basak Senova is a curator and designer. She studied literature and graphic design (MFA in graphic design and Ph.D. in art, design and architecture at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey) and attended the 7th curatorial training program of Stichting De Appel, Amsterdam. Currently, she is a visiting professor at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna. Senova has been writing on art, technology, and media, initiating and developing projects and curating exhibitions since 1995. She is one of the founding members of NOMAD, as well as the organizer of «ctrl_alt_del» sound art project. Follow her on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, or on her Website.

Published on January 20, 2022

Last updated on March 11, 2024

Topics

Curation

All Topics

Special

Politics of Curatorship

print as pdf

Filmstill: Ceza (Music), Esen Entertainment (Video): «Türk Marşı» (Turkey, 2012)

Reading the Turkish March from Ceza

Short Essay

by Basak Senova

In this commentary, curator and designer Basak Senova discusses the background of Turkish rapper Ceza’s music video «Türk Marşı» (2012). The video mashes elements from past and present Turkish culture to challenge the circulation of clichéd images between the East and the West.

In 2012, Turkish artist Ceza was rapping over the Turkish march by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart with non-traditional beats. Around 1783, Mozart composed the «Piano Sonata No. 11 in A major» (K. 331/300i) in three movements. Inspired by Ottoman military bands called mehter takımı, he composed and tilted the last movement as a Ronda and titled it as «Alla turca» (Perl 2000). Later, the movement was popularized as «Turkish rondo» or «Turkish march». It is set in allegretto and elaborated upon with extra percussion effects.

Echoing an Idiom

The Turkish marching bands consisted of up to three hundred musicians who accompanied the Ottoman troops into battle. Today, their music is still used in ceremonies. It is characterized by an often high-pitched sound combining bass drums, horns bells, triangle, and cymbals. The music they played, as well as the costumes of the military bands were quite colorful (Yum 2002). The bands used to perform a distinct walking rhythm by pausing every third step according to the beat (Yaldır 2009). Later, this walking style became an idiom in Turkish culture, referring to slow pace in progression: «Walking like a mehter takımı, two steps forward and one step back.»

Questioning the progression in society and politics, rapper Ceza uses this idiom «two steps forward and one step back» a few times in his lyrics. Subsequently, he is also suggesting rewinding and considering the situation of this cycle. What is even more outstanding is the re-location and the movements of the elements in the clip, as if they are visually echoing this idiom.

The East and the West

If we view Orientalism as simply the depiction of aspects in the Eastern world by the West, or in Edward Saïd’s words as a fabrication of the East by the West (Saïd, Jhally, and Talreja 2002), one can easily trace the contemporary Orientalism in many aspects of the globalized world. Hence, what interests me in this topic is the migration of the images from one context to another and how this movement is being reversed and practiced many times. Rapper Ceza is challenging the circulation of the clichéd images between two mentally static poles: the East and the West.

The Chase

The clip starts with Ceza chased by half-animated characters (representing classical music) in Balat, a district located on the European side of Istanbul, in the old city on the historic peninsula on the West bank of the Golden Horn. Starting from the 17^th century, Balat had become a mixed neighborhood, Muslims living with Jewish, Greek Orthodox, and Armenian minorities (Kluiving and Guttmann-Bond 2012, 86–87). Hence, in the 20^th century, the minorities started to move to the North of the historical peninsula and to the Asian side of Istanbul, leaving Balat to the poor migrants coming from Anatolia (Ortayli 1987). Therefore, the history of Balat already shows a map of relocation and movement.

The half-animated characters representing classical music, without a doubt signify the West. The clip continues in the South East of Türkiye, in the old city of Midyat, Mardin, depicting the old Eastern architecture in the background, while Ceza is still being chased by the characters.

The video finally ends in Hasankeyf, which was an ancient town on the Tigris river with thousands of dwellings and tombs. Despite all the local and international objections for the last ten years, in 2020, Hasankeyf and its archaeological sites, along with 150 villages in this area, were all submerged under 65 meters of water with the completion of the Ilisu Dam (Kocabas 2013) part of the GAP hydroelectric power project, also known as The South-Eastern Anatolia Project (Al-Madhhachi, Rahi, and Leabi 2020).

It was quite symbolic for Ceza being caught by the characters in the middle of the bridge on the Tigris river. Hasankeyf does not exist anymore. Respectively, the song ends with the final lines telling us that we cannot even step back anymore.

List of References

Al-Madhhachi, Abdul-Sahib T., Khayyun A. Rahi, and Wafa K. Leabi. 2020. «Hydrological Impact of Ilisu Dam on Mosul Dam; the River Tigris». Geosciences 10 (4): 120. (https://doi.org/10.3390/geosciences10040120).

Kluiving, Sjoerd J., and Erika Guttmann-Bond. 2012. Landscape Archaeology between Art and Science. From a Multi- to an Interdisciplinary Approach. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Kocabas, Hale. 2013. «Planning in Fragile Sites in Turkey: In Case of Hasankeyf». In PLANNING TIMES – You Better Keep Planning or You Get in Deep Water, for the Cities they Are A-Changin’, edited by CORP – Competence Center of Urban and Regional Planning. Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Urban Planning, Regional Development and Information Society. 691–700. Rome: CORP.

Ortayli, İlber. 1987. İstanbul’dan Sayfalar. Istanbul: Hil Yayınları.

Perl, Benjamin. 2000. «Mozart in Turkey». Cambridge Opera Journal 12 (3): 219–35.

Said, Edward, Sut Jhally, and Talreja Sanjay. 2002. Edward Said on Orientalism. Video, 40 minutes. Northampton: Media Education Foundation.

Yaldır, Ayşe Aysun. 2009. Askeri müzik topluluğu mehter, geleneksel kıyafet ve müzik enstrümanlarının plastik açıdan seramik sanat objelerine dönüşümü. PhD. diss. DEÜ Güzel Sanatlar Enstitüsü.

Yum, Şule. 2002. «Mehter musikîsi». Antik Dekor 69: 102–8. Istanbul: Antik AŞ. (http://earsiv.sehir.edu.tr:8080/xmlui/bitstream/handle/11498/17555/001583669010.pdf).

This commentary has been written in the context of «DisOrient: Welcome to the Hall of Mirrors». A virtual music video exhibition by Norient for Mannheimer Sommer (July 12–22, 2020). Because of the Corona pandemic, the festival took place as a virtual event.

Biography

Basak Senova is a curator and designer. She studied literature and graphic design (MFA in graphic design and Ph.D. in art, design and architecture at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey) and attended the 7th curatorial training program of Stichting De Appel, Amsterdam. Currently, she is a visiting professor at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna. Senova has been writing on art, technology, and media, initiating and developing projects and curating exhibitions since 1995. She is one of the founding members of NOMAD, as well as the organizer of «ctrl_alt_del» sound art project. Follow her on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, or on her Website.

Links

Basak Senova: «Challenging Orientalism Pt. 2» (Norient)

Published on June 19, 2020

Last updated on April 09, 2024

Topics

Music Video

Place

Othering

All Topics

Special

DisOrient

print as pdf