TAYFUN SERTTAŞ, Flashblack: PILEVNELI | DOLAPDERE

PILEVNELI is preparing to host Tayfun Serttaş’s solo exhibition titled "FLASHBLACK" from 27 April to 26 May, 2018. The Maryam Şahinyan archive will be exhibited at an art gallery for the first time since being made public in 2011. "FLASHBLACK" is also the most comprehensive exhibition to date of the artist’s continuing relationship with visual archives as conceived in a spatial context.

 

Tayfun Serttaş defines his relationship with archival data via the ‘transposition conditioned by decontextualization and recontextualization’. The archives featuring different qualities, which he masterfully formulated at various stages of his career, are also attempts at transposition. From time to time, Serttaş does not refrain from dedicating his exhibitions to the practices of leading masters from different disciplines, since for him the artist today is obligated with presenting a ‘proposal’. In Serttaş’s proposal, the archive faces the subject rather than the object. It is not attached to the work of art, and it is not instrumentalized in the service of the work of art, it appears, rather, as precisely the problematic itself. The medium is not manipulated, film is for archive what the tape is for video, images are analysed in keeping with the essence. It lies beyond the ready-made; it is discovered, processed, conceptualized, and finally, added to the relevant literature. What is emphasized through the Maryam Şahinyan archive finds an answer in the nature of art inherent to action. Resistance is concealed along this natural itinerary (for instance, scenography as a boundary-activity). In this context, FLASHBLACK is the need for the theoretical heritage of photography that corresponds to darkness as much as light, to the accumulation of an ‘enlightened past’ filtered through the darkroom.

 

For 60 years, Maryam Şahinyan sustained an uninterrupted career in studio photography, a profession under the monopoly of men – and she did not only take photographs. She also included in her frame, a specific social section of the history of the Republic that was highly difficult to visually access. The 20th century tradition based on the distinction of spatial and instrumental criteria unique to women and men also determined the customer group of Foto Galatasaray that could be analysed as an equation involving the categories of ‘women’, ‘middle-class’ and/or ‘urban’. Maryam Şahinyan was a woman; as a master, for over half a century, of a profession that was not granted to her, and as the eye behind the lens. She enabled the production of a visual history that stood distinct from the male gaze... This unintentional/deliberate stance also renders the Şahinyan archive one most unique visual oeuvres of the history of Turkey.

 

During a period of such intense debates over identity/roots, the decision to return to the Maryam Şahinyan archive was not an arbitrary one. Social norms, countless times destroyed and reconstructed throughout the different layers of the modernization of Turkey have also cleared the path of a cultural ambiguity, to which no one is able to assign a full sense of belonging.

 

The main problem here should be sought in the tendency of every new layer to deny and disregard the previous layer. However, the perpetuity of culture depends on its ability to record, preserve and reflect all the phenomena it blossoms within. Supplying visibility to the ‘personal’ as the field not only of intimacy, but also of public appearance, is to defend the democracy of memory against the apparatus of power, which does not refrain from creating a new ‘other’ for every period in order to define itself. To resist, with such a vision, is to refuse to forget.

 

Tayfun Serttaş lives and works in Istanbul.

 

The exhibition is organized with the contributions of Jotun.