HÜSEYIN ALPTEKIN
|
|
|
|
HÜSEYIN ALPTEKIN
Hüseyin Alptekin´s work is all about mobility: he uses materials circulating in our daily lives, such as postcards, cigarette boxes, plastic footballs, toy trucks. He initiates the “Sea Elephant Travel Agency”; he reactivates Jules Verne´s novel “Kéraban-le-Têtu”, in which the main protagonist travels the entire Black Sea belt in order to get to the other side of the Bosporus; he points at the ways in which the signs of low and high culture bleed into each other; he refers to the not much discussed social dynamics which he calls B-Facts (the territories around the Black, Baltic and Barents Seas, and the Balkans); he depicts the phantasmagoric flow of cities' names in other geographies; to mention just a few of his topics. One of Alptekin´s recent projects is to re-appropriate a dysfunctional social object, the bunkers that were produced in numbers by the paranoid regime of Enver Hoxa in Albania against a fictional, or at least exaggerated, enemy. These massive and obsessive objects are to be transferred into other non-functional contexts, such as art institutions, and to other cultural environments unfamiliar with that type of militaristic furniture on the public field, and offer an uncanny sort of social space. Another recent project by Alptekin is the last in his series of panels made up of grids of sequins, a material with a quivering lustre, somewhere between kitsch and glamour. In this version, we see the word Balkan inscribed on a black background. The first syllable of the word is yellow, while the second is red. The symbolism in colour refers primarily to the Turkish words for honey [bal] and blood [kan], and secondly to the German tricolour flag. The visual pun employed here underlines the interconnectedness between Turkish, Balkan and German cultures and histories, the difficulty and the futility of delineating borders of representational nature, and the fictional character of any identity. In each panel Alptekin invents font types imaginatively referring to the culture in question: this time it´s the Balkans. It might also be meant as a little teasing hint at the motivations behind the exhibition this panel was designed for. Erden Kosova |