Sunday, March 13, 2016

'Turkey Suspended', by Anne de Fazio Siciliano, 11 March 2016



TURKEY SUSPENDED Ferhat Ozgur, Anne de Fazio Siciliano 

50833_Ozgur_I-Can-Sing In Istanbul, here's where it still makes sense to speak of March 8. Especially now, even now after yet another ban to demonstrate for the festival of mimosas. We are not in Iran but in Turkey yet Reading Lolita in Tehran, the magnificent novel by Azar Nafisi, can be a broad ideal place to meet in an ironic chat ( "chat Metamorphosis") the two female protagonists of Ferhat Ozgur video. Still until Saturday, 12 to the space Art Gallery of Via Flaminia, the two women of the same generation but otherwise educated, do not exchange as it happens through the pages of the novel, in front of a placid tea, the story of the tragic daily or valuable advice adventures of reading. If anything you exchange clothes, shoes, clothing and identity. Even if only for a moment, for the time of a click by photo-reporter. The turkish artist Ferhat instead (following a personal reading of Flavio Favelli in the audience) can not squeeze into a book and escape from the reality of his country, nor dressing the clothes of another and Western, nor wearing a look at something else . Taking off the bandages from his eyes exoticism, Turkey is a country "burned" where art, whether it makes sense to talk about art, has no place except as a simple document, the event still vaguely lawful, as a place, way escape and complaint. About what? A total lack of freedom and expression to begin with, but also of marginalization when deprecation of women. It prohibited, on pain of imprisonment from 6 months to 2 years (not 3), of irony, say, more or less explicitly to offend the Turkish flag and the very concept of "turkishness" Turkishness. The so Ferhat operation is doubly courageous, because apparently carefree as in the work "I love you 301" where a black poster with white lettering, funeral announcement, repeated like a chant the norm of 301 turkish penal code (which had seen ending also accused Pamuk) with delicate tragic irony. "It's time to dance" starring a woman instead. The performer with lots of burqa (the East) and amphibians (the West) is unleashed on the rhythm of an Arabic tarantula, crazy and broken away from it all. Far away, on ' "Acropolis" deserted city. Outside the rules, from the borders, by the checks. Outside, in the only non-place where a woman can take possession of a space, of life, of his own body. Exesto! Only there the margins of society. The 4th video, the most poetic, at times disturbing: "Remains of the Day" overlaps dreams to nightmares, free roads crossed by crazy bicycle races in the boys fringes deployed as armies that travel without a smile the same streets where just before they had left flying in the sky air balloons. Transformed into camels of books and characters twisted by paintings by Balthus: perpetually stuck in the contradiction of being poised why more implants to other places, other spaces, other geographical coordinates. Always in the air like balloons ready to burst for the nonsense of the only possible answer is that the escape from reality.