MEMED ERDENER / EXTRASTRUGGLE
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MEMED ERDENER / EXTRASTRUGGLE
Combining the grotesque character of the brilliant comics works he produced in the most avantguard Turkish humour magazine “Deli”, during the first half of the nineties, and the minimalist style his current profession as a graphic designer calls for, Memed Erdener launched a personal project with the name Extrastruggle to frame a series of works that would operate on the more autonomous ground of art. These pieces mainly consist of superimpositions, assemblages and counterpositions of two or more graphic elements which are embedded in the memory of Turkish society as the constitutive visual codes of the national identity: maps and arrows designed to support the myth of the nation; sentences and drawings from the primary-school books which still emanate the devotion of the early years of the Republic anachronistically; the tension between the Arabic and Latin alphabets; photographs of the dramatic and historical moments of the nation; the iconographies of the Kemalist, Islamic and fascist ideologies; and everyday icons (logos of public companies and political parties, warning signs etc.). When brought together, these disparate and sometimes contradicting figures start to play against each other and produce a third semantic field that constitutes the ironic criticality in Extrastruggle's works - not unlike the Situationist technique of detournément. The irony in them aims to displace discourses of various political orthodoxies -mainly of numerous modes of nationalisms that were highly popularised throughout the nineties. Recently, Extrastruggle has reduced the use of ready-made images; introducing a series of compositions featuring the main protagonist Türban Şoray, a female Muslim devout, thereby returning, to a certain extent, to the visual language of comics. Erden Kosova |