They Were Just Constantly Flying In Circles

Kevser Güler

Translated by Zeynep Nur Ayanoğlu

 

— Laurie Anderson, The Beginning of Memory

 

How do memories embedded in the body affect our ways of making sense of the world? What do the bodily traces of life and experiences say about the ways in which we encounter and relate to the past that is not told in stories? Focusing on the expressions of the body’s temporal openness in her recent works and continuing her production around the concept of body memory, Çağla Köseoğulları proposes to look closely at the forms, effects and meanings of the traces of her body movement in these works. In her works between 2020-2023, the artist reconfigures her methods of painting, and adopts performative ways in which she understands the agency of surfaces as affected bodies, rather than drawing, painting, and representing a predetermined image.

 

In a series comprising four works titled “Dust”, “Road”, “Ground”, and “Wave”, Köseoğulları creates volatile stains on the surfaces in which she intervenes with intuitive hand movements. She refuses the surface to remain in a state of withdrawal, solely making room for the image, and instead emphasizes its existence as an agent that does perform and is acted upon in the work by moving the surface with gestures that bear the traces of a body memory. She makes the intercorporeality of the body memory visible in the process of producing her works and builds her relationship with the surface and material as a performative bodily interaction. Adopting a different technique in each of the series “Dust”, “Road”, “Ground”, and “Wave”, the artist traces the unspoken, unrevealed memories, reactivation of the body memory and its meditative processes.

 

“Ground” is the series for which Köseoğulları produces with charcoal on paper. The artist creates a homogeneous jet-black surface by applying charcoal on white paper, creating a new surface with the velvety blackness of charcoal, which absorbs light almost without reflecting it. Köseoğulları creates a void that absorbs the person standing in front of it with this jet-black surface, replacing the reflective, separative void of white. The dust-like texture of charcoal that the artist applied layer by layer to create this homogeneous blackness, which can fly about and disperse with any external  effect, confronts us with the fragility of this steadfast jet-black surface. Köseoğulları ventures to see indeterminate landscapes on these black powdery surfaces that she creates in the “Ground” series through exploring these landscapes using erasers. The artist, who is also interested in the conception of void in the Far Eastern painting tradition, reduces the charcoal layer on the black surface with an eraser, leaving a trace of her gesture.

 

In Köseoğulları’s “Dust” series, which she produced with charcoal powder, void is prominent again. While producing the pieces in this series, the artist leaves charcoal powder on paper and moves the paper in various ways, allowing it to form gaps, traces and clusters. In addition to the artist’s intuitive hand movements, physical effects such as the airflow, humidity and vibrations of the floor also influence the formation of the forms on the paper. Reminiscent of the Birds mentioned in Laurie Anderson’s song “The Beginning of Memory”, these dusty landscapes contain knots and densities that can be dispersed at any moment on paper, just like the processes of an embodiment of memory.

 

In the “Wave” series, Çağla Köseoğulları uses ink on PVC and, just like in the “Dust” series, she creates it by moving the surface itself. The artist creates this series by moving and shifting the ink that she pours onto the PVC surface. This series, in which the transparency of PVC adds permeability to the work, posits the gaze on an ambiguous place between landscape images that presuppose a distance and microscopic images that can only be observed if viewed quite closely. The “Wave” series is open to the traces of the artist’s body memory in the way it is produced but also invites images regarding the slippery ground of the relationship with memory by obscuring the distance of the gaze.

 

In the “Road” series, which includes ceramic sculptures, Köseoğulları explores the possibilities of folding clay as another way of reviving body memories. In her sculptures created by folding the clay that she planarized in various ways, the artist pursues the possibility to encounter the three-dimensional effects of her body movements. While the sculptures in the “Road” series evoke associations such as the remains of tree hollows, animal skins, found rock fragments, dried-up soils, they not only bear a trace of the memory of the artist’s hand, but also trigger the imagery memory in other respects.

 

In her exhibition They Were Just Constantly Flying In Circles, Çağla Köseoğulları reveals the body memory as a story without a story, between abstract forms and an indeterminate past, present and future with her series of works titled “Dust”, “Road”, “Ground” and “Wave” produced between 2020 and 2023. She invites us to think together about how embodied memories, the ways of movement inscribed on the body, the traces of the body’s inexhaustible performativity are involved in our processes of establishing new relations with the world.