Deniz Gül

The tenuous relationship between text and art is at the heart of Deniz Gül’s exhibition “Loyelow.” Titled the same, Gül’s book published this year—perhaps best defined as a novella—provides both an anchor for and a point of departure from the objects in the gallery space. The show, which ends with a short film, is held together by a shared potential of movement. The familiar green garden hose set on the floor, a semitransparent sink holding water, the generic blue tiles climbing up the wall, all share similar associations, forming a network between and among them. The installation placed in the center of the exhibition, Loyelow Fields (all works 2016) is a mesh of things that once were—cement casts of objects such as toy cars or shoes serve to remind one of the gap between an object’s image and its physical presence.

In the video Stardust, an antihero confronts an excavator that moves back and forth. Just like the man in the image, the viewer is fixed in place, experiencing the pain of this character’s immobility. The young man, looking at the violent movements of the machine, turning the earth literally inside out, appears to be frozen in a moment of indecision, wanting to move but not being able to. The opposite of the possibilities symbolized by the objects, the video pulls in another direction, making obvious the all too familiar failure of individual resistance in present-day Istanbul. But the latent potential of the individual, who just needs to be present until the sensational fictions wear off, is the remaining hope of Turkey following the attempted coup d’état.