Klitsa Antoniou’s installation "Parallelotopias" works in tandem with Orhan Pamuk’s biography Istanbul, "Memories of a City" (2005), in order to visually and somatically erase Pamuk’s memories of the city. However, this artistic intervention is not directed towards Pamuk’s representation of the layers of memory of the history of Constantinople that he unfolds through the pages of the book but rather it is a gesture that attempts to establish a new relationship between the text and the viewer. In short, this is an act of deconstruction that furthers what Pamuk has already initiated in his book with the insertion of two hundred or so photographs in the text.
These photographs, the majority of which are by the Armenian photographer Ara Güler, provide the symbols through which the melancholic soul of the city of Istanbul is revealed to the reader, in order to disclose the precariousness of cultural re-alignments and more specifically the emptiness and the void that was left behind with the demise of the multiculturalism of the Ottoman Empire that resulted from the establishment of the Turkish Republic. For Pamuk, the photographs represented a projection of his own memory onto a screen, a statement that reminds us of Freud’s notion of screen memories. Screen memories according to Freud are not childhood memories as such but memories about childhood. Important facts are not retained; instead, their psychic significance is displaced onto closely associated but less important details. Most importantly for Freud these memories are characterised by a visual representability similar to that of mnemic symbols and images. It is exactly this visual representability that Antoniou’s interventionist erasure brings to the visitor. Through the intervention of the artist, the multilayered history of the city of Thessaloniki can be revealed in tandem with the histories of other cities of the ex-Ottoman empire. The installation works in harmony with Villa Kapandji and its history within the turbulent past of the city and its many layers of memory and the communities -Jewish, Armenian, Turkish and Greek- that informed its history. Antoniou’s work engages with these many layers of history, in order to invite the visitor to become an archaeologist who will excavate these remains in order to reveal the parallel spaces and their temporalities thus revealing traces of memory, which are often related to traumatic events from the history of the city. The exhibition greets the visitor with "Parallel Narratives", a group of old school desks reclaimed from the past lives of the city, on which copies of Pamuk’s book are placed. The visitor is invited to participate in what the Turkish author initiated with his book in uncovering the richness of multi-cultural Ottoman Constantinople through its ruined mansions and dark alleys. The visitor is asked to tell their stories in order to reveal the memories of the city, which are entangled with that of Constantinople and the fate of the Ottoman Empire. This re-writing of memory reveals its malleability and often the abuses that can be inflicted on it by selective remembering and forgetting. Through the doors of this room, the visitor can glance the parallel spaces of the exhibition, the "Horizon Line", through a series of seventy models with the eyes resting beyond on the horizon on the sea that ferried the many waves of immigration to the city. The models, created by seventy artists, provide a dialogue with the photographs of Pamuk’s book uncovering through intricate constructions/deconstructions the memories of the artist through spaces, sometimes familiar –a staircase, a dining room, a court yard– and objects associated with these spaces, in order to reveal their materiality as mnemonic devices and provide parallel voices to those of the photographs. The installation cuts through three rooms of the building thus creating a further dialogue between Constantinople and Thessaloniki. The "Sound of Time is not Tick-Tock", a video projection with sound and flashing lights, digitally manipulates Ara Güler’s photographs that Pamuk uses in his book, producing an uncanny, un-homely effect that disorientates the viewer allowing him/her to enter the hermetically sealed space of the photograph in order to become the eye of the photographer and participate in constructing the moment in time that was captured, in order to bring to life the stillness of the image and the memories associated with it. The flashing, erasing lights, in between projections, and the sounds that accompany them provide a reminder to the visitor of the traumatic history of the demise of the Ottoman Empire and work in a way similar to traumatic recall: they provide embodied glimpses to the past but never revealing the whole narrative. The visitor needs to work through their bodily reaction to the projection, in order to complete their traumatic recall of the past. Which brings the visitor to the final somatic encounter with the traumatic past of history. In "Round Trip 2", a bathtub full of black ink and the old typewriter provide the viewer with a further multi-sensorial encounter. The blackness of the liquid, recalling images of the abyss and the phantom typewriter that seems uncannily to float on the surface asks the visitor to imagine, to become secondary witness like the children of the refugees from Asia Minor that are visiting the homeland of their parents on the video projection above. This secondary witnessing becomes a prosthetic memory for the visitor like the photographs in Pamuk’s book. Gabriel Koureas Birkbeck College, University of London |
The Cultural Centre of MIET - National Bank of Greece Cultural Foundation |
