​Burçak Bingöl

Rooted Matters,

2016, Ceramics, 37x33x41 cm, Unique

“Burçak Bingöl brings together a scene from a 17th Century Persian miniature with the recent political events in Gezi Park in her piece Unforeseen Resistance (2015). The original miniature, a tile panel in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, depicts a garden picnic. Vessels, vases and other crockery decorated with floral motifs are strewn across the grass, similar floral motifs appear on the figures’ dress. There is no real distinction between the opulent flora in the garden, its surrounding landscape and representations of nature used as decoration on crockery and garments. What is camouflaging or decorating what, and which came first: art or nature? All the visual elements of the tile dissolve into each other in one magnificent homogenised layer. In her project Bingöl reverses this process: her sculpture - modelled after a commonly used Ottoman vase - is growing out of its source material, a clump of clay. Is the object resisting the clay and breaking free from it, or is it subordinated by its own source material and imprisoned by it? It is hard to say, but the cracks of a struggle show visibly in the work. Gone is the flat surface of the miniature. Bingöl has bestowed volume and a sculptural presence onto her vase. Her decorative element is a controversial one: grass from Gezi Park. In May 2013 Gezi Park became the backdrop and symbol of nationwide unrest. Starting originally as a protest against plans to turn Gezi Park, one of the last green spaces around Istanbul’s Taksim area, into a shopping mall, protesters “occupied” the park in ways the gentry in the Persian miniature did. They sat on the grass, asserted their presence, held picnics…until the police violently broke it up. Soon the protest turned into broader demonstrations against the AKP government’s increasing encroachment on freedom of expression and other civic liberties, as well as on Turkey’s secularism. Fast forward to 2015 and the situation in Turkey has deteriorated on every front. The Gezi protests, like the grass motifs on the vase, left their indelible mark on Turkish society. The question of what this means in the long run is, like Bingöl’s object’s relationship to its material, an uneasy one.”*

*Excerpt from the catalogue of the exhibition Minor Heroisms, curated by Nat Muller

The work problematizes the idea of making. It builds itself with the broken shard of a typical traditional ceramic vessel. It reveals visual information with the glamorization oozes out of the cracks of a broken Ottoman vase. The secret potential of the local history is expressed with today’s point of view, while the pieces come together to form a fragile whole again.