Pages from the zine Chorus, 2020. Printed materials, metal wire, nylon threads. Photos by Kayhan Kaygusuz.

This site-specific installation featuring a zine was produced for the space of Tütün Deposu (Istanbul) on the occasion of the exhibition Up above was fog, down below was a cloud of dust (January-March 2020). Thinking about the historically and socially charged space of Tütün Deposu—currently functioning as a not-for-profit exhibition and event space for culture, arts and critical debate in the city center of Istanbul with a focus on practices which deal with historical and contemporary social issues—, I was drawn to accentuate the columns of the space. Building a connection between the function of the chorus in a tragedy as the conscience and guide to the audience and the columns as an architectural feature that holds and relays the tensions between the different elements of a building, I used some of the hooks and nails that already existed in the space to connect all the columns to each other. Next to each column in a zine that collates visual and text-driven materials that I have collected in the exhibition process. In dialogue with the form of the chorus book, the zines are also hung and lit as to draw attention to the particularities of this space. Imagining a multiplicity of voices reading, interpreting, and performing this zine is central to this work. I have performed a reading of this work on February 14, 2020, encouraging other viewers to interact with the material in their own way.

Stills from From a Wandering Window, 2019.12 min 46 secsSingle-channel silent HD video

Camera and editing by Ali Taptık

Video link: https://youtu.be/a4f8QVmo_vo

Stills from From a Wandering Window, 2019.12 min 46 secsSingle-channel silent HD video

Camera and editing by Ali Taptık

Video link: https://youtu.be/a4f8QVmo_vo

Stills from From a Wandering Window, 2019.12 min 46 secsSingle-channel silent HD video

Camera and editing by Ali Taptık

Video link: https://youtu.be/a4f8QVmo_vo

With From a Wandering Window (2019), I pursue and record the vantage points of a window, which I claim was displaced on its own accord. I begin with a piece of narrative based on the history of a historically and culturally-charged space—a mosque in my neighborhood (Kağıthane, Istanbul) that sits across the river from the relatively new home of the state archives—, “the window frames had fallen, doves had built nests inside, and spider webs had covered the walls.” This window started wandering at this moment of dilapidation in 1974. The first section of From a Wandering Window is a reversal of the bird’s-eye-view, starting at the building of origin. The high-contrast black and white footage aims to underscore the artifice of the image, spliced with short sequences of found footage—a controlled demolishment site and migrating swallow nests in construction sand.

What could be timeless as well as spaceless is the material for this work—a narrative that appropriates fragmentation and displacement as a method. I’m seeking to find out when the image will cease to show, tracing the boundaries of this medium to question the premise of revealing and telling, a structural weakness of the medium that resonates with the structural weaknesses of historicization processes and narrations. I would like to explore if perspectives could become the narration—for all that is unutterable, could wandering perspectives provide an articulation?

Sky of Artifice, 2019. In collaboration with Didem Erbaş. Rug, led lights. 1.5 x 2 m.

Produced for an art fair in Istanbul, this floor installation is made up of two elements. The plastic rugs, very often used outdoors to prevent slipping, were purchased from an underground pass, which flooded during the heavy rains a few weeks past. There were marks of the water on the rugs, which we mimicked and repeated using a knife. We mirrored the artificial lighting of the fair environment to draw attention to trigger a flickering of the gaze up and down.

Shooting the Window, 2019.Photograph, printed on satin fabric, 3 x 2 m.

My first self-portrait, Shooting the Window is a caption to A Transmitted Dialogue (2019) and From a Wandering Window (2019). Inspired by Clement Cogitore’s Braguino (2017), I wanted to creature an image-based signature—the photograph was taken in the park next to my apartment with a bear paw on my right hand and looking at the building that I have previously made videos of.

right-left-up-down, 2019. Zine, edition of 100. Produced on the occasion of f project, initiated by Umut Altıntaş. All of the works use black and white photocopying as a material and the group exhibition has traveled to four cities in Turkey. Photos by Engin Gerçek-Studio Majo.

I related the act of photocopying to sheets of paper becoming notebooks, taking notes, becoming a foundation of something and I made “left-right-up-down”. The condition of being a page, corners, the diagonal and sideways kinships made me think about words; I tried to make something in which each page could be a site, where words fidgeted and played and could potentially host other states of playing.

Only A Corner (Poşe), 2019. Site-specific permanent installation at Poşe, Istanbul. Plaster, paint.

Only A Corner is a plaster site-specific intervention, softening the corners where two walls meet to create a concave, softer corner. Only A Corner is an interpretation of the notions of healing, treating, and transforming. With the goal of making visible the negotiations between the architecture of a space and production, Only A Corner is an attempt to mark and embody the colossal effort of being present. Gifted to the artist-run-initiative Poşe for as long as they choose to keep it, I hope this work reminds people that artworks mark and permanently alter spaces. In thinking about this artist-initiative in Istanbul and their sacrifices to keep the space open, Only A Corner is a caressing of the space, taking dialogues and situations presented to artist by artists as a departure point.

Sketch for Only A Corner (Poşe), 2019.

Instrumentalized, 2019.Installation; a photograph of Clara Rockmore, printed on foam board, a hand-written letter on foam board, two car antennas, a song by Meczup to be added to the playlist of the office building.

Galeri 5 is a not-for-profit art gallery in the lobby of an office building in Ümraniye. Artist Gizem Karakaş kicked off the Devir project in January 2020 by inviting me to do an eight-day residency at the space over the course of a month before choosing an artist to hand over the space to. During 2019, this group exhibition unfolded.

Confronted with an empty gallery, I researched the area of Ümraniye and took walks in the neighborhood. Ümraniye—a rapidly developing neighborhood, en route to becoming a business hub—was frequently uttered by the president to remind his base of a tragic event from the 1990s. There was a gas explosion in the city dumping ground in Ümraniye. More than forty people, trash collectors living near the site, died and most of the bodies were

never even recovered. In thinking about the absurdity of the context of the gallery, I arrived at thinking about the instrument of theremin as a metaphor for all that is unutterable and unrepresentable. Could exhibitions imply bodies that are not there? Could the seemingly empty space become a site of all that could be activated?

As the office building was right next to the small auto-industry, I bought two car antennas and placed them on the two walls of the niche looking over the street. I wanted to imply a connection between these two walls that were connected to each other through what they could broadcast and utter. The other elements of the installation—the photograph, the letter, and the song—were left to start off the artists coming after me, functioning as messages to the future of the space.

Double, 2019.Three-part installation including two cement sculptures; wooden sculptural interventions, and ten 11 x 14 in. photograms.

Invited to a one-day pop-up exhibition at the Istanbul Literature House, I used the brevity of the exhibition time as a departure point. The Literature House has bay windows, which, in the Ottoman context, were used as semi-private spaces that women could use to see more of the world—during the Ottoman times, women’s presence in the public space was a problematic issue. The apparent benevolence of this bay window triggered me to think about it in terms of the harsher, opaque materiality of cement. The two sculptures are based on drawings of the light coming in from the bay window at two different points of the day—a physically impossible co-existence, made permanent through cement. In the next room were two site-specific wooden sculptural interventions, one concave, one convex, positioned diagonally from each other. The idea was to separate one whole into two complementary halves and place them across from each other to produce a spatial tension, again creating an impossible co-existence. The photograms of ice melting were placed throughout the exhibition to draw upon making permanent fleeting presences and temporalities.

Sketch image for A Transmitted Dialogue, 2019. 10 min 12 secsStereo sound (best experienced with headphones)

Sound editing by Emin Yu

Sound link: https://soundcloud.com/merve07/merve-unsal-a-transmitted-dialogue-2019

A Transmitted Dialogue (2019) is a sound collage, made from audio recordings of NASA. Cutting and splicing sentences and phrases from various recordings, I wrote a new dialogue. With this dialogue based off of descriptions—while one party can see, the other can’t—, I am interested in finding out when a narrative and a description begin to lose their function.

Prop-SurfacesPrint on pvc mesh and fabric; various dimensions.

Merve Ünsal negotiates the thresholds of domestic dwellings through positioning them in stark contrast, always in relation to herself as an eavesdropper and voyeur. Imagining these scenarios as similar to her sound pieces, Prop-Surfaces explore the physical awareness of Ünsal to her environment. By creating protagonists of architectural buildings, human subjects become occupiers, while the artist extrapolates on that position of being “inside.”

Outside Instead of Before, 2018.Two single-channel HD videos, 17 minutes each

Video by Emin Yu

Video links: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QK83j-QquMk&t=24s and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYpd3zp0ank&t=656s

Exploring the district of Kağıthane where she lives, Ünsal’s Outside Instead of Before takes the gentrification and construction of a riverbed zone and the secluded lives of those in the neighborhood as its point of departure. She imagines a dialogue between the two sets of windows through multiple vantage points. From the photographic image, to apartment window frames and the computer screens, Ünsal’s focus is on the strange equation of difference and sameness that governs processes of the production and the reception of images. Ünsal’s use of the camera lens and the frequent introduction of a black screen between the changing angles become a method of mimicking the look, the feel, and the limits of the natural eye.

Ünsal looks from the limits of her apartment, also a studio, to what she can see outside the window and through her own eye. Looking out the window is a way of paying attention to the world. One can recognise a new place, which changes from the feminine domestic space to a transformed urban landscape all in one sweep of the eye. A critical element in the films is the relationship between the the physical locations of the apartments and the built environment as well as their perspective to the larger framework of society. Ünsal works with the friction between the voiceover text and the images, a possible stand-in for the hostility of the domestic space. Just as it is never possible to show things as they are, how is a home constructed, by whom and for whom? Ünsal constructs a narrative of her

new neighborhood from within her work and living space, tracing the boundaries of her specific representational realm.

Ignorance is Bliss, 2018. Radio drama: as a broadcast on Açık Radyo and a sound installation. 17 min.

Sound link: http://acikradyo.com.tr/podcast/209110, as broadcast on Açık Radyo on September 11, 2018.

Ignorance is Bliss, a theatre piece that Ünsal wrote, includes the Taksim Mosque; Euro Plaza (a hotel near Taksim constantly changing owners where neo-liberal policies that now govern the city of Istanbul were discussed in the conference room in the 1990s); an unknown building (I claimed that this building hosted women’s groups before the women decided the building had fulfilled its mission and donated it to another unknown purpose.) and SALT Beyoglu (a former apartment building, owned by a Greek family, now owned by a bank and hosting a cultural institution, where the exhibition was taking place). The buildings communicate through the resonances and vibrations of their foundations of buildings that the narrator has listened to through an ISKI (Istanbul Water and Sewerage Administration) crack covered at an undisclosed location in Beyoğlu on June 25, 2018, 9:35 am—the day after a critical general election in Turkey.

The characters talk at each other, without engaging in direct conversation. While SALT Beyoğlu uses stock phrases from local politicians, Ataturk Cultural Center keeps saying, “All fears are dulled by routine,” and Euro Plaza reads information from product packages. The drama is Ünsal’s attempt at voyeuristic listening.

Voiced by Kumbaracı50 actors (Burakhan Yılmaz, Ceren Sevinç, Dilan Parlak, İsmail Sağır) and Merve Ünsal

Hold (Blue and Red), 2018. In collaboration with Lara Ögel. Site-specific installation including a two-channel sound piece; photograms; photograph; sculptural intervention using saran wrap

Sound link: https://soundcloud.com/lalarra/sets/ne-bana-sen-ne-sana-ben

Addressing notions of inhabited space, what it is to hold space in relation to community and cultural production, Lara Ögel and Merve Ünsal use photograms and sculptural inventions to create a constellation of surfaces in the halka art project space in Moda, Istanbul. The exhibition was the last one in the space, before the artist-run initiative was pushed out due to rising rents. The departure point for the installation is a found image of the Salt Lake in Turkey, which had turned red after the appearance of a species of algae, connected with the increased heat. This image’s hinting at imminent danger and its inherent duality served as the foundation of the installation. On the ground floor, a photogram of the window above the door at 430pm—the supposedly golden hour of photography—marks the space. On the second floor, a column is reproduced using saran wrap, another gesture towards marking, tracing, and holding a space at a specific time and place.

Tracing the boundaries of the objecthood of space and time, Lara and Merve contemplate on the relationship between architectural bodies and the image as a body, collating the two to see where and how architecture overlaps, undermines, buries the image.

The two-week exhibition also hosted reading and discussion groups, using the objects and surfaces of the exhibition as a toolbox to dissect some of the themes the artists deal with.

120 Images, 2018. Talk-Work, February 16, 2018, Istanbul.

120 Images, 2018. Talk-Work, February 16, 2018, Istanbul.

As a selection of 120 images looped in the background—both from a diverse set of sources and the artist’s own photographs—, Merve discussed her on-going research on pain and its hosting bodies, touching on visuality and visualness, distance, representation. She used a reverse lecture format, asking questions at the beginning of the talk to delve further into how she was beginning to articulate responses to the questions.

Now You Are Far Away, 2017Public space performance; happening; classified ad in a newspaper; printed materials; video; sound.

”Now You Are Far Away" is presented in the form of a video documentation of the projection of the phrase “Now You Are Far Away” onto the Bosphorus Bridge, the sound recording of the happening that took place on boat going to and from the site of the projection, the classified ad that announced the location and time of the performance in a mainstream newspaper’s “other” section, and a zine including reproductions of the “unutterables” of the people who were at the happening. The idea was to create parallel events, one private, one public, while thinking about utterances.

The performance was inspired by marriage proposals that are projected onto the bridge. It is a relatively cheap and common thing to do in Istanbul. A company providing such services was used to realize the performance, under the ruse of friends getting together to send a message to a former lover. 20 people were on the boat for the “private” performance/happening, where each person discussed and determined how to record what is unutterable for them. This collective negotiation led to the representation of this performance in the gallery in the form of the above mentioned materials.

For the Internet Project, an interpretation of the performance produced for Praksis, please click here. This project was workshopped during a residency at Praksis (Oslo) in November 2016. The residency, Cultural Mistranslations, was led by Smadar Dreyfus.

Harboring Feelings (Floating Narratives), 2017.Public space performance, commissioned by City Link Festival in Copenhagen, Denmark. Photos by Abdellah Ihadi.

The performance took place on September 22, 2017.ON/OFF performed an urban action to reinvigorate a different experience on Sydhavnen waterfront. They built a raft manifesting the industrial heritage of the site and acting as a testing ground for a performative urban action. A critical aspect of the raft was that all the materials were used in a way that did not alter their original state—no glue, no nails. In other words, the materials of the raft were brought together for the duration of the performance and then dismantled the next day to be used again.

The Floating Narratives raft hosted the performance Harboring Feelings during the City Link Festival. Artists Merve Unsal and Onur Ceritoglu launched the raft with members of the audience. They talked about feelings that they have been harboring, framed within urbanity and gentrification—to think about safety of harbors in relation to feelings.

The performance was repeated multiple times throughout the allocated two hours. The raft was taken out into the water by one of the two artists with three participants at a time due to safety regulations. No sound or video recordings of the performance were made as the raft was meant to be an ephemeral space of discussion and interaction.

Stills from Three States of Water, 2014.3-channel video with sound.

Camera and editing by Merve Ertufan.

Video Link: https://vimeo.com/128712420

Stills from Three States of Water, 2014.3-channel video with sound.

Camera and editing by Merve Ertufan.

Video Link: https://vimeo.com/128712420

Running 15 minutes Late, 2014. Talk accompanying Three States of Water, Istanbul.

Three states of water is the video recording of three experiments with one material (water). Each video is approximately 15-minutes long. The video was accompanied by a one-time talk of approximately 15-minutes titled Running 15 Minutes Late, which focused on the relationship between animals and humans through the perspective of time and timeliness.A revised and expanded version of the text for the talk is available here, https://m-est.org/2014/11/28/running-15-minutes-late/.

Measuring Istanbul Modern, 2014. Unrealized performance proposal.

The proposal is to measure the periphery of the Istanbul Modern building with a lipstick. The unit of measurement is not centimeters, meters, yards, or feet, but the length of lipstick. I am to use one tube of lipstick and the whole periphery of the building will be measured, including the private areas and the dock, which is considered to be international waters. This performance is to be realized once and will not to be recorded. The accompaniment of a security guard is acceptable. The final work will be a number, written in lipstick on the wall of Istanbul Modern.

The proposal was made in response to an invitation to do a performance in the garden of Istanbul Modern—tracing the boundaries of the institution, when invited only to the garden for a performance, made sense.

Update: This work, as it was proposed, is no longer possible as the building is currently under renovation to be integrated into the mega-scale Istanbul project, Galata Port.

Institutional Ambition, 2014. Keychain, edition of 100.

Produced at a time of trying to hold multiple roles within the contemporary art ecosystem in Istanbul—ranging from production assistant to translator to writing catalogue texts—, this keychain was meant as a playful gesture. It was distributed for free to other cultural practitioners struggling with similar negotiations of fluid institutional positions.