In her new individual exhibition “Osman Killed Me”, Zeyno Pekünlü meets with the audience with five new works. The exhibition that is named after Osman F. Seden’s 1963 dated movie, mostly consists of video works that reorganize familiar images, symbols, sounds and texts that we grew accostumed to come accross, see and hear. Comprising a wide spectrum of material from the National Anthem, Nutuk by the founding leader of the nation, Yeşilçam melodramas, to daily news on violence against women, Zeyno Pekünlü’s works traverse public and private manifestations of various forms of subordination, and problematize the technologies of power. The works invert the social functions of materials through deformation, contextual detachment and categorization of ordinary texts and images. Rather than creating an instance of enlightenment, the novel perspective offered by this method exposes the spectator to a state of temporary perplexity, disorientation and non-identification. Therefore, aims to open a critical space by combining power mechanisms that seem independent from each other such as; nationalism, militarism and patriarchy.
The male violence uttered in a Sunday afternoon conversation of a middle class couple, an absurd National Anthem that is waving over an urban demolition, the Yeşilçam masculinity that is transformed into an abusive act by separating it from language, subvert the constitutive historical and social myths by discrediting them while constructing the daily existence as a political field. Scanning a range of issues, from the construction of maleness and femaleness as gender roles to the constitutive myths of citizenship and nation, the approach of the works aims to decipher patriarchy that encompasses the intimate and the social simultaneously. Among these works that have an ongoing dialogue with each other we find out the suggestions shared by the social opposition: disrupt, subvert and rethink the given.
The male violence uttered in a Sunday afternoon conversation of a middle class couple, an absurd National Anthem that is waving over an urban demolition, the Yeşilçam masculinity that is transformed into an abusive act by separating it from language, subvert the constitutive historical and social myths by discrediting them while constructing the daily existence as a political field. Scanning a range of issues, from the construction of maleness and femaleness as gender roles to the constitutive myths of citizenship and nation, the approach of the works aims to decipher patriarchy that encompasses the intimate and the social simultaneously. Among these works that have an ongoing dialogue with each other we find out the suggestions shared by the social opposition: disrupt, subvert and rethink the given.
