Jean-Charles Massera: How do you articulate your work, dealing specifically with history of art or contemporary art culture with the non-artistic reality ?Serkan Ozkaya: All artists come from periphery. My only relationship to art was through pictures, catalogues. Coming from Turkey, I would be an art lover. For a long time, I duplicated difference works I had seen in magazines. When I copy some work made by another artist, Joseph Kosuth for instance, I make it sort of domestic and I make it my own... There is this layer of "appropriation".
| Once I put thirty thousand slides of different works of art in the storefront of an art gallery on the street level. At night, we left the light on and people could see the work. At some point I lost control on the content of the slides. In fact I added slides that had nothing to do with art, you could have images of people dining, images of Tom Cruise, medical slides etc. These were the images people on the street were interested in.So later, Maria Hlavajova and I did a piece in Utrecht, where for almost a year we collected slides from the inhabitants of the city. Then we installed them. Pictures of everything you could imagine or not imagine. Some people found the work brutal in its mechanical way of displaying the images, and I agreed. For me, the starting point was only visual, mechanical and formal (rectangular images, all same size, placed next to each other). | |
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Here, in the “Proletarier Aller Länder” there is only one figure, one specimen which has been duplicated over and over again. The same specimen, the same shape, the same color. When I first showed this piece, e.g. some ex-communist friends of mine came to me at the opening saying that I had caught the essence of the proletariat. Because in order to belong to them, you had to be the same as everyone else in the community. And if you are different, you no more belong to them anymore. I had no idea of this. For me, when I started to make them, the form was more crucial. Someone even accused me to force people to step on the workers, and some other people said that one couldn’t suppress the workers and even if you step on them they would always pop up again.J-C M: What about this video piece you showed in Nantes?SO: I made five video pieces. One of them, was about translating the press release of a show in an awkward language, about being the three most stupid artists not even understanding the press release of the show they were in. Since we didn't speak the same language, it was hard for us to find a common language. So one of the artists started to read the press release in a very awkward way. It was producing a total miscommunication between the artists, between the works and the artists who were making fun of everything, of the works, of the press release. I recorded that. That was our piece for the show.
In another one, I shot my friends and all these things that were happening in Paris and Nantes, all these things about my little life. Then I edited it in a 45 minutes film format. I added it up some music. You could see a list of names, you could see it as a normal film with a plot. Another artist who also was in Nantes and I watched it and started to talk and make fun of them, of these people. One of them, one of the people who had been in the film got offended. I think because we called him a fag in the film, so James -- that was James -- stopped talking to me. When I showed it later in Istanbul, I showed the whole script on the Internet and there was also a catalogue which upset the fag’s brother.
It's a cathartic instinct of mine to try either to justify or condemn my whole presence or being, this Dasein which consists of the knowledge I have and my body. Every time I start to show or make a piece, I start to be very frighten, I get anxious, because I know I might upset people, I might get into trouble. Even if what I'm doing can be utterly stupid, still I go for it, just for the sake of the anxiety, the anxiety of being ridiculous.
