When I was introduced to Eda at the Gorki Theater in Berlin we had briefly exchanged hellos but the light in her eyes which I can describe as ‘curiosity’ made me look at her works when I came back home that evening. Weightless Load was the first work by her that I saw. This article was written after quite a long time when I received an email from Eda about the exhibition that she was preparing.
Out of which material and how should a flying carpet be made? With the knowledge of today, we know that we need “another” technology for that. This should be a technological carpet but weaving technology is not sufficient. Eda has used “other” technologies, but not the ones we expect. Translating a feeling or a thought into a motif and weave it on a rug is such a technology; a technology established and functioned throughout centuries. Of course, it is not just that; it stretches from food technologies to epoxy moulding, DC motors and programming. In The Baklava Carpet, Eda merges all technologies in each other. The motif named after the dessert or the dessert named after the motif, namely Baklava, turns into a flying carpet carrying the past to the future with many layers. A vast imagination and a fearless skill of doing combine all technologies which seem impossible to come together and a flying carpet woven on “Eda’s Future Looms” appear before us.
Starting out from rug motifs, the artist conveys the meaning and connotations of the baklava motif, namely, the motif’s memory or the society’s collective memory expressed in a motif, to another element of the same cultural tradition, namely, the baklava dessert, in order to weave it again on a higher level, carrying this into her work. She weaves a surreal carpet from real baklava. And this is not all there is; the carpet flies. This is an extremely speculative and experimental work, as well as young and bold. This encounter opens up new horizons of thought.
While combining all technologies and culture as a technology in one single work, she decontextualizes each element, baklava motif, the dessert baklava, the legend/fantasy of the flying carpet and brings them together in a brand new context. The work that she creates includes it all, and while creating a strong and new image without keeping any of them out, she weaves a feeling of a future that we would like to “know” instead of an unknown future.
“On one hand, I personally started to feel robotized and like losing my emotions” says Eda regarding her love of technology and interest in the digital. While weaving technologies in Baklava, she regains her emotions that she felt like losing with today’s digital technologies by including organic material into the work. She transforms the “robot” that she has created into an object functioning and living out of her control. The baklavas continue to decay; life goes on inside the robot; the work turns into a cybernetic creation. The flying carpet carrying you with the load of the past to the future floats in front of you.
Baklava is a work also using digital technology and this is also how Eda classifies it. The digital element (engines, programming, etc.) is a functional intermediary rather than a criticism towards itself. There are also other technologies involved; ordinary production technologies which we do not call as technology today: baklava is an industrial product at least, or as I mentioned before, culture is also a technology (like language). As such, it refers to a means rather than a “digital” medium, and after all, everything is digital in post-digital times. The digital is now an ordinary technology; if it does not bring any criticism regarding itself then there is not much need for emphasis. Maybe we can emphasize something else: if we consider
that all these technologies piece by piece constitute the medium of the work, we can call Eda’s works as post-media works. Now, no media has a dominant meaning by itself. Just in this long and uncertain transition period defined with the prefix “post”, Eda creates works which sincerely and bravely question the current state and, on the other hand, lead the way in their time.
Artifical Tears, It Didn't Hurt, The Weeper
Elif Akçalı
Eda Sütunç’s two performance videos Artificial Tears and It didn’t hurt along with her sculpture The Weeper explore the (subtly feminized) subject’s bodily relationship with domestic objects, chores, spaces; a theme apparent in her previous works. To me this relationship seems to be an erratic one; revolving around acceptance, attachment and conformism on one side while evoking ideas of revolt, rejection and escape on the other. The slow, patient, and peaceful act of producing artificial tears in Artificial Tears is strangely everyday-like. But why produce artificial tears? Have her natural tears dried? Can she not, or has she forgotten to cry? Is it perhaps difficult, or impossible? Tears are artificial, yet the persistent act of producing them suggests that the emotion is not. This act points to a necessity. There is a need to release the tears, a necessity that the body cannot meet naturally. But why then, produce artificial tears? I find this to be a conscious call, taking control of the body, coercing it to do what it is supposed to do involuntarily. Although the artist’s body does not specify femininity, the enclosed space that envelops her and the objects that she engages with imply domesticity, indirectly referring to a housewife figure. But the small fan, the mirror, the knife and the onions are not objects of household chores and they surpass their ordinary meanings via the performance. Perhaps the erratic nature of the work stems exactly from here. There is a visible desire to control the self, a desire to subvert the ordinary whilst being tangled in the familiar continuity of insignificant everyday acts. The subject is discontent, yet she does not leave, she does not stop, to the point of exchanging the self with a mechanical being. It seems to me, she is caught in a loop of self-denial, or more precisely, in a relation of what Lauren Berlant calls “cruel optimism.” The exponentially rising tension in It didn’t hurt is maybe more obvious in its cruelty. A self-beating body, screaming “it didn’t hurt”; this is movement against words, thought against bodily response. There is a split-self here, one that bears two identities, perhaps. Who is beating whom? Whose act is genuine? Is any of them in denial? If “it didn’t hurt”, how do we read the facial expression? The clinging onto the endless and painful beating, it seems to me, is indicative of a faith in it. The issue is not the nature of the beating itself; it is believing in it or desiring it. The body is submissive to the beating because it thinks it is necessary and desirable. But the same body spurts out involuntary responses as evidence of being hurt. Thus, the two bodies in the two performances are forever caught in this loop. Is the body-less sculpture The Weeper at these performances leave behind eventually, as an abstraction? Or is this the real body that the artist is attempting to become in the performances? An imprint of a face, pipes, artificial tears, and a tray, suggesting again the domesticated feminine self, suggesting again a mechanical being. Forever in a loop.
Genderless Nipples
Aylin Sunam
As Perez underlines in her book “Invisible Women” (2020), there is a huge lack of data in the recorded history of humanity. The historians of the past have given very little coverage to women and remained silent on the life of almost the other half of humanity. The shaping of women’s historical representation by male writers and in terms of male interests has been significantly affected by cultural and ideological tools including science (Çakır, 2011) and this has almost uninterruptedly continued until 1970s when feminist historiography gained pace. Freud’s statement (1933) that women have contributed very little to the history of civilization with their discoveries and inventions can also be seen as the continuation of this traditional historiography practice. According to Freud, the only technique that might have been invented by women throughout the history of humanity is the knitting/weaving technique which we also often encounter in Sütunç’s works. Freud considers this technique not as an important invention in organizing culture but as a metaphor of absence. Although he has confessed that he could not prove his theory, Freud claims that due to the absence of penis, women have first started to weave their pubic hair and and thus developed the technique of weaving. In 1970s this lack of data in the history of humanity started at least to be covered a little bit. Contrary to the thought that different characteristics attributed to women and men are natural, universal and unchangeable, the feminist historiography has demostrated that these roles are socially constructed within certain historical contexts and started to show us women’s
contributions in different fields by challenging the traditional historical consensus from this period on.
A good example from recent times for this new historiography is Kruger’s book entitled Weaving the Word: The Metaphorics of Weaving and Female Textual Production’ (2001). As Kruger also underlines it, the knitting/weaving practice has an important place in the creation and reproduction of language and symbols. In this context, as Roland Barthes etymologically expounds, the connections between the act of weaving, language and culture starts to become visible when we start to look at the textile products as a text. Besides, the relationship established between the act of weaving and cybernetics by Plant, author of the article “The Future Looms” (1995) by which the artist’s exhibition is named after, who has significanly contributed to feminist historiography regarding the relationship between technology and women, and the tactics suggested in A Cyborg Manistesto (2018) by Haraway to destroy the beginning myths of the Western culture, offer a distinct layer in reading Sütunç’s works. Emphasizing Ada Lovelace’s contribution to the history of technology as the inventor of computers, Plant describes the development of computers and cybernetic machines as the acceleration, miniaturization and complex becoming of the weaving process. While, on one hand, the weavings realized by the artist by means of artificial intelligence and digital technologies remind us this new reference of weaving practice recently put forward by Plant, they show, on the other hand, the tactics developed by the artist following the footsteps of Haraway in order to subvert the stories affirmed by the present system.
In her work “Genderless Nipples”, Sütunç first shows us the stories woven in the weavings of Anatolian women by conveying the ram’s horn and hands on hips motifs to her weaving. However, seeing these motifs, which symbolize male power and female fertility, as symbols preserving the hierarchical dualism of naturalized identities, the artist recodes the stories by means of artificial intelligence in order to reverse this dualism. Another intervention featured in this work are the visuals of genderless nipples which will once again remind us Freud, who has claimed that women have invented the practice of weaving their pubic hair in order to hide their absence of penis, and make the audience smile who know this reference. In this weaving, Sütunç places the visuals of female and male nipples, obtained from porn sites and the Google search engine and presented in a genderless way by means of artificial intelligence coding, into plaster moulds that she has produced from ram’s horn and hands on hips motifs.
As Paasonen indicates (2011), the gradual identification of the term cyber with technoutopianism in the practice of contemporary media arts has gradually decreased the interest in the cyberfeminist movement and there has been a visible decline in the number of artists who define themselves as cyberfeminists. Yet, as quite distinct from the cyberfeminist imagination put forward 23 years ago, there is still an ongoing need for the continuation of investigations and interventions in this field when considering the social and cultural affects of new technologies predominantly shaped by digital capitalism and their role on individual experiences. Today, as we witness the continuous reproduction of gender norms and hierarchical dualism between genders, it is also possible to read this work by Sütunç as a reply to this digital climate.
REFERENCES
Barthes, R. (1975). The Pleasure of the Text. Translated by Richard Miller. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Criado-Perez, C. (2020). Invisible women: Exposing data bias in a world designed for men. London: Vintage.
Çakır, S. (2011). “Feminist Tarih Yazımı: Tarihin kadınlar için, kadınlar tarafından yeniden inşası” der. Serpil Sancar, 21. Yüzyıla Girerken Türkiye'de Feminist Çalışmalar, Koç Üniversitesi Yayınları, İstanbul.
Freud, S. (1933). New introductory lectures on psychoanalysis. Lecture 33: Femininity. Standard Edition, v.22 https://archives.history.ac.uk/makinghistory/resources/articles/womens_history.html
Haraway, D. J. (2018). Cyborg manifesto. Victoria, British Columbia: Camas Books.
Kruger, K. S. (2001). Weaving the word: The metaphorics of weaving and female textual production. London: Rosemont Publishing & Printing.
Paasonen, S. (2011). Revisiting cyberfeminism. Communications, 36(3). doi:10.1515/comm.2011.017
Plant, S. (1995). The Future Looms: Weaving Women and Cybernetics. Body & Society, 1(3-4), 45-64. doi:10.1177/1357034x95001003003