ŞENER ÖZMEN / ERKAN ÖZGEN
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ŞENER ÖZMEN / ERKAN ÖZGEN
In his videos, Erkan Özgen pursues a documentary approach to the traumatic experiences and mental disturbances among the Kurdish population in South East Anatolia, as bitter consequences of the brutal civil war in the region during the last two decades. Şener Özmen’s projects, on the other hand, employ “plastic narrations” which playfully circumvent his doubly peripheral status as an artist from Diyarbakır, putting him into a phantasmal contact and levelling with the more privileged art scene in Istanbul, and secondly, with the premier league of global art. The recent collaboration of these two artists The Road to Tate Modern may, in this sense, be seen as the last sequence of Özmen’s book projects The Story of Tracey Emin and Manifesta Murders. In the video we see two men travelling in the barren landscape of South East Anatolia. One of them rides a horse, holding a long stick in his hand, while the second follows him on a donkey. The figures unmistakably refer to one of the most famous protagonist couple in the history of literature: Don Quixote de la Mancha and his servant Sancho Pansa. Short glimpses of their journey hint at the torment the two figures suffer, and their sense of being lost. On a crossroad they hesitate which route to choose and ask a passer-by how to get to their destination, which is the temple of contemporary art in Europe, the Tate Modern. The video operates, on one hand, as a passionate complaint about the impossibilities of shaking off the hierarchical power relations between the central and peripheral geographies and cultures, and on the other hand, as a self-mockery in which the artists display the futility of their endeavours and the excessive seriousness and the rigidity that accompanies the modernist discourse dominating the periphery on its progress towards an ever-escaping model - as exemplified by the bureaucratic outfit of the two figures. Erden Kosova |