It is tempting to talk about CANAN within the framework of the tempestuous politics of Turkey right now—with a civil war rapidly unfolding in the southeast of the country—and to reconsider the body and its integrity, or lack thereof, in terms of the state. This exhibition, “The Shining Darkness,” presents images that stand on tentative ground in relation to power paradigms, appearing most clearly strained in the video Hezeyan (Delusion), 2014, and the series of photogravure prints “Transparent Police Station,” 1998.
The seemingly unassuming, almost abstract imagery of that series depicts CANAN in the nude, forever reproducible from etched metal plates. Multiple views of her body overlap in some of the eight individual images. In Transparent Police Station 4, the infantile handwriting on the walls that the artist seems to be kicking, pushing, and caressing reads like a chant. It includes the word “bütünlük,” or “integrity,” but within the context of CANAN’s practice, this is not something merely preached but rather is as tangible as the wall on which it’s written.
Hezeyan (Delusion), an hour-long love story gone awry, is acutely personal. The artist is the protagonist, obsessed with a stalker who is in her computer but is also a man she knows in real life. The boundaries between what the artist experiences in front of her machine and what happens outside of the digital realm become increasingly blurred. CANAN positions her video at the intersection of romance’s reality, love as it is represented in culture, and the role of surveillance in structures of power—its oscillation between tenderness and violence. After all, watching is a form of care, and there is something about the paternal tenderness of monitoring that the artist addresses here. Is it possible to love too much? When does care become corrosive?
