Just For The Hell Of It

Taken from Orhan Veli’s poem with the same name, “Just for the Hell of It” finds correlations between the absurdist existential approach of the poet and Berkay Tuncay’s works. “Just for the Hell of It” stands as a response to the artist's recurring question of purpose in producing art. Tuncay creates a line between contemporary communication methods and the history of human connection, weaving together the past and present using mediums that have traditional backgrounds. Memes, emojis and text ornaments among others which inspire his current productions offer a glimpse into human’s long desire to find ways to communicate beyond the constraints of time and technology.

 

The exhibition showcases Tuncay’s works that reflect on the impact of the internet and digital culture, employing traditional methods like embossing, screenprint, and vinyl letterings, in addition to an ASMR video installation. In his latest series, “Passive Aggressive Poems”, inspired by symbols decorating Instagram bios, Tuncay constructs text-like forms. He experiments with visual poetry, showcasing enlarged glyphs and symbols, building on his exploration of text. The video installation “Poems from Instant Messaging (ASMR)” stems from Tuncay's poetry book of the same name. ASMR videos, known for their tingling sounds like whispering and unpacking, serve as the source of inspiration here. In the video, the poems used are expanded versions of internet acronyms, organized alphabetically to resemble instant messaging dictionaries.

In “Poems from Relaxation Videos”, he investigates how smartphones and laptops contribute to soothing stress caused by that same technology. In this work, he also deals with found words, sourced from relaxation videos on YouTube. He extracts them from the screen, formulates them into poems mimicking captcha codes, and gives them a spatial presence. Similarly, in “Poems from Descriptive Noise”, the inspiration for the work comes from the script of the TV series "Mr. Robot". Treating these subtitles as found poetry, he assembles the descriptive noises from the series into an experimental poetry format.

 

While creating new meanings by bringing these audio descriptions, he deals with sounds separately in these unique print works he produced using the embossing technique. By creating reliefs on paper, he invites the audience to resonate the sounds in their minds. The photographs “Nausea” and “Smiley Column” follow Tuncay’s research finding similarities between cave art and memes; classical texts and contemporary approaches. Nausea shows the artist with a green nauseated emoji shaved on his head. Referencing Sartre’s “Nausea” from the 1930’s and Parquet Courts’s song “Content Nausea” (2014), the artist points out the continuum of search for meaning and social anxiety over a century. Smiley Column, a photograph taken at the ancient city of Perge in Antalya, shows a smiley face carved into an ancient column.

The screen print 'Gucci' shows another example of Tuncay’s interest in internet slang, as it means 'awesome', and 'cool'. By employing widely recognized symbols like broken image and language icons, Tuncay creates an abstraction, reminding us of the artist’s engagement with internet culture and language.

 

“Just for the Hell of It” displays Tuncay’s works that explore his interplay with historic forms of expression and their contemporary counterparts. From traditional to experimental poetry, Tuncay uncovers historic references that resonate with today's alternative modes of communication. With use of traditional mediums and contemporary symbols, the overlap reveals the lasting quest for connection and the search for meaning in an ever-changing world.