Artist Statement
War and art are instinctive human activities. Thus, as long as humanity has fought, artists have reacted to war differently. The topic of war triggered in my mind when I saw the pictures of Syrian war-torn people, and I recalled Susan Sontag's quote, "War tears, rends. War rips open, eviscerates. War scorches. War dismembers. War ruins". My main concern was to set space for these sentences. On the other hand, I was also thinking about the relationship between war and death because death becomes an inseparable thing in the lives of war-torn people and is no longer an embodiment of fear. A war-torn person may see another dead body many times during the day and sense death as closely as possible.
The concept of the Displacement project is the destruction after the war, and I endeavored to show the destructive effect and displacement caused by the war in people's daily life. I tried to avoid cliched images related to the war in my works. Animal carcasses, especially domestic animals, have been one of the most used elements in my recent installations that indicate death. Cloth clothing is another element that refers to humans and their absence; humans once existed in the cover of these colored fabrics, but they no longer exist. The pile of clothes can symbolize people and memories multitude, perhaps a collective memory. When it lands on the carcass, the disaster reveals itself; War, destruction, displacement, and bewilderment.
Meanwhile, the other three works from the Displacement series consist of three fiberglass head sculptures of domestic animals whose bodies are covered with a map of Africa under shabby used clothes, and the other one is attached to a brick wall. The way these three statues are placed on the ground is such that the head of each corpse is placed along the other. Despite the distance between all three parts, it brings to mind a closed circuit. The map of Africa and the brick wall show the colonial goals of those in power.
On the other hand, my mental concern is related to the current human condition in the world. I try to make sculptures to go beyond the function of being a mere sculpture and present a concept. In my last two installation projects, I tried to utilize new and different materials as much as possible in my works, such as clothes; The combination of various materials has always been pleasing to me. I want to show another picture of the devastation of war because most of the visual works related to this concept are pictures of soldiers and war scenes and less about daily life. In this way, I used images and news documents related to war and massacres as references.
The book Regarding the pain of other by Sontag and Christian Boltanski installations have affected my ideas a great deal. In my works, like Boltanski, I used people's clothes as a symbol of their absence; The absence of people who were once present somewhere covered by these various fabrics but no longer exist. In Regarding the pain of other, Susan Sontag discusses the condemnation of war. She thoroughly debated why it is denied, which helped to open my mind and better understand the war.