ESRA ERSEN
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ESRA ERSEN
The two main characteristics of Esra Ersen´s works - site-specificity and a biting political edge - were already apparent in her earlier works. A critique of repressive discourses, operated not only through the state mechanisms, but also through the conformist retreat by the population as a whole from public space, was translated into Ersen ´s works as a distance she retained between herself and the audience - a distance meant to hurt. What had been repressed, concealed or rendered invisible by a suffocating consensus was brought to the surface. Ersen´s experiences during a series of extended stays in Western Europe seem to have had a dramatic impact on her works. Having retained the two dynamics of site-specificity and critical political attitude, she started to focus on the communicative dimension surfacing during the process of art production, on the interaction between the protagonists of her works and the audience. This dimension, in turn, led her to study the cultural differences between her culture of origin and the ones in which she was working and exhibiting. Parallel to this, the choice of medium in her works shifted from installations designed to produce a first-hand, unsettling atmosphere towards docu-narrations pursuing a dramatic course. Undoing the conventions of cultural stereotyping, reversing and de-familiarizing the clichés and ascribed qualities about the West and its Others, resisting the representational modes of expression which were expected of her by the inviting institutions, and deliberately pushing her topics towards banality or self-erotization were some of the strategies Ersen employed in a playful, and sometimes lightly provocative manner during this period. Ersen´s most recent projects are based on some minorities or marginalities within various contexts. Defying the comfort of contrived gestures of empathy for the Other, Ersen questions her own authority over her videos´ plots, in which the structures of narration are being slowly taken over by those she interviews and in which they elaborate on their own critiques, dreams, wishes, minor utopias in unexpected ways. Erden Kosova |