weekend : Aykan Safoğlu

For his first gallery exhibition in Turkey, Aykan Safoğlu will be showing the second essay-film of a trilogy on death — ziyaret/visit, along with a new body of work.

Departing from the basic principles of analog photography, Aykan Safoğlu constructs form-fluid works to pose questions related to queerness, migration, and dispossession. In his durational works and interventions, Safoğlu challenges our notions of resilience, celebration, and most recently, mourning. In ziyaret/visit, the artist performs an introspection on why he has not been able to take photographs for a long period of time. Safoğlu’s cessation from capturing images marks a turning point in his life, as well as an ‘unspeakable’ event of rupture in our collective memory. In other words, the artist mourns his traumatized former self who is reluctant to take photographs, whilst appreciating his slow reconciliation with photography.

Safoğlu’s camera invites us to wander in Berlin's historical cemetery ‘Alter St.-Matthäus-Kirchhof’ (Old St. Matthew’s Churchyard) along with his long-time friend Gülşen Aktaş— a Kurdish feminist cultural worker, who relocated to Germany following her mother Şirin Aktaş' footsteps in the late 70’s.

In Safoğlu's oeuvre, the dialectic of friendship is indeed both a central theme and an artistic methodology. In ziyaret/visit, the artist's friendship to Gülşen Aktaş enables him even to elaborate on a rich symbolic and semantic network to reflect on German social dynamics. Aykan Safoğlu joins Gülşen Aktaş and her sister Nurşen at the cemetery gates to turn it into a prolific site for an archeology of feelings.

So [they] go inside and [they] gravely read the stones
All those people, all those lives
Where are they now?*

Afro-German poet May Ayim, renowned conductor Israel Yinon, Hamlet Manukyan, artist Helga Goetze, the legendary Grimm Brothers to name a few...Their metaphorical encounters allow the spectator to migrate to different timescapes subtly drawn by the artist, accounting for how "one's past perfect becomes our present tense".

Elif Akçalı will lead the artist through a public talk on January 18, 2020 that will start at 3pm. The talk will take place in the Galata Hall on Cibali Campus of the Kadir Has University. (in Turkish)

The show will be accompanied by a bilingual publication entitled "I Wanted to Photograph You": a rigorous conversation initiated by Denise Helene Sumi with Aykan Safoğlu on the occasion of the artist’s residency at Akademie Schloss Solitude. "I Wanted to Photograph You" was originally published on Schlosspost, an online portal of Akademie Schloss Solitude, in March 2019. The Pill would like to thank the editorial team of Schlosspost for their generous permission to republish the text.