BUSE CESUR
CUMMING HOME
1.02 - 2.03
PİLEVNELİ | DOLAPDERE
PİLEVNELİ hosts Buse Cesur’s first solo exhibition, Cumming Home between February 1 and March 2, 2024. In this showcase the young Turkish-American artist draws inspiration from her multicultural understanding, exploring concepts such as identity, the body, and material experimentation. Her works delve into provocation, gender, cultural codes, entrenched linguistic patterns, and the 'moments' embedded in her everyday life. Buse relies on common sense and shared knowledge, often defying convention. Manipulating the form and function of everyday objects to challenge behavioral and social codes. Her sculptures and installations confront taboos, power dynamics, provocation, language, the male and female body, considering social norms and identity. Over the years, Buse's practice has empowered her to materialize her personal and everyday archive, utilizing various media and techniques, including ceramics, casting, photography, video, wood, metal, and ready-made objects.
Cumming Home serves as an archive, showcasing her coming home from Chicago to Istanbul and comparing her two homes: the US and Turkey. Analyzing, questioning, and deconstructing everyday domestic objects, traditions, and rituals from both backgrounds, she presents a profound exploration. Upon entering the exhibition space, the viewer encounters Finding Home, an installation depicting Buse's journey in search of a home after leaving Chicago. Stacked ceramic bowls that fit exactly on top of each other create a pillar from floor to ceiling, metaphorically symbolizing a structure within her home. Influenced by her ceramic professor, who mentioned that ceramic glazes mixed with water from different regions could affect the outcome of the glaze recipe, Buse experiments with applying separate glazes mixed with water from different regions to each bowl, symbolizing her quest for home.
Her practice involves an ongoing questioning of the spoken and unspoken rules of the 'white cube' gallery, coupled with a relentless pursuit of pushing and testing these boundaries. Through her installations, she is keen on observing how people navigate within those borders and how they interact with the works on display. The visitors’ experience of her work becomes part of her artistic practice, as it is that moment of encounter with the audience that makes her work complete. In her work Border she divides the room into two from one wall to the other with tiny stoneware tea bags, leaving the audience no choice but to step over them to see the work on the other side of the room. Making the amount of tea bags placed in the installation sight specific to the space. On one side of this border, she ties American Lipton tea bag labels and on the other side Turkish Caykur tea bag labels.
An Artist's Footprint is a photograph capturing an accident that occurred while she was documenting her sculptures amidst white gallery walls. She then takes this fragment from Chicago and places it in Turkey within the same ‘white walls’, using the size of her foot to scale the photograph. Buse uses scale as a meaningful and strategic display method to communicate proportions of the body or specific body parts. Therefore, the curatorial process of Cumming Home becomes a means to provoke the viewer to engage with the works using their own bodies.
In the context of art history the term ‘venus’ is a general term given to images possessing female reproductive organs. Based on this, Buse creates her own venus by displaying two brushes at breast height and one brush at vulvar height, creating a representation of a woman's body. The conceptual background emerges when the viewer reflects their own body onto the artwork.
Absence of the body/ taboos
In her work, Buse portrays the absence of the body using abstracted bodily fluids and phallic forms, often incorporating elements of humor. Her playful approach is evident in her selection of titles and materials that allude to the human figure. Opposite from Venus which displays the female body, is Cleaning the Pipes hung at male genital height expressing the aftermath of masturbation with the flow of transparent beads coming through the water pipes, creating a puddle that intrudes into the viewer’s space. Accompanying this installation is a sound composition consisting of four recordings capturing four people masturbating from Buse’s life.
The latex casting of a traditional double-boiler Turkish tea pot, titled Sünnetli? Sünnetsiz? transforms the teapot into a fetish object with phallic-looking handles activated with embedded electronic parts. By utilizing the tension between a traditional Turkish artifact and a fetish object, she addresses challenges and sexual taboos in Turkey.
Her work is significantly impacted by her OCD and ADHD, reflecting through the repetitive process or method of display. Her obsessive condition arises in the places she lives in. The installation 'It’s the jacket on the back of the chair for me' originated from a conversation she had with her ex at his house, where he said, “I’m sorry, my house is really messy” and added, “Honestly, it's the jacket on the back of a chair for me.” This phrase led her to think about how it bothers her when her roommates or guests throw their jackets on the chair when they come home, and how she immediately wants to hang it in the coat rack. This reaction sparked the idea to design a chair as a ‘fuck you piece,’ intentionally crafted to deter people from casually throwing their jackets on it. The cold metallic chair has a half-open cabinet on the back of it with an empty hook inside the cabinet, indicating an imaginary jacket. Accompanied by a disturbing sound of someone walking into a room and throwing their jacket on a chair and their keys on a table on repeat; this sound displays her discomfort when she encounters a situation like this.
Play on words and proverbs
Recently, she has been revolving her work around proverbs and using play on words. Revealing One’s Dirty Laundry, a Turkish saying 'kirli çamaşırlarını ortaya dökmek,' questions why someone's love life and intimacy are considered as 'dirty laundry.' Photographs printed on linen with delicate lace borders are hung on quilt hangers like laundry, capturing the intimacy of two bodies, their closeness/distance, and the space between their bodies. On the other hand, her work Havuzluk is a play on words like 'Coming home - Cumming home,' joining the Turkish words 'havuz and yolluk,' 'pool and runner,' literally creating a runner from mosaic pool tiles.