HALE TENGER
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HALE TENGER
Hale Tenger´s initial works, exhibited in the early nineties, had a consistent tendency towards the expansion of the disciplinary limits of sculpture towards wider semantic possibilities, through the employment of found objects and the incorporation of music, lyrics and texts. The objects joined in these compositions were regularly unfixed and displaced from their established meanings, sometimes with the help of the works´ titles. Certain common themes, such as the representation of asymmetries of power due to gender, cultural and ethnic identity, self-imposed submission to orthodoxy, cultural introversion, and the potentials of agency, social evolution and healing, which emerged in these early works remained present in Tenger’s compositions through the nineties and beyond. The School of Sikimden Aşşa Kasımpaşa (1990) and I Know People Like This II (1992) from this period satirised the populist nationalist discourses in Turkey. The former work targeted spectacular violence, male aggression and phantasmagoric investment in the heroic past, whereas the latter mocks the easy submission of the masses to the discourse of modern nationalism, through the use of kitsch bricabrac representing the phallocentrism of the popular culture. Later works by Tenger moved towards the production of atmospheric environments displaying expressive material. Her subjects range from discriminatory immigration policies to the critique of stoic strands of Western philosophy through an emphasis on corporeal and sensual qualities of her installations. Tenger remained attentive to the tensions between the image and the text, the object and its meaning, and the direct and indirect modes of experience. One of her series of installations in particular, which alluded to the nightmarish terror of Turkey´s recent past, encouraged the new generation of artists to develop a more radical, confident voice. Sikimden Aşşa Kasımpaşa is an idiom in Turkish which could be translated as "not to give a fuck" Erden Kosova |