acousticspace

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Nation, national, and nationality are among the most problematic words in our vocabulary. Despite the fact they were merely inexistent until a couple of centuries ago, they have come to be perceived as permanent conditions of existence and categorizations of men. The emergence of each nationality, always coinciding with and supported by sibling constructions such as ethnic identities and racial formations and social technologies such as censuses, maps, and museums, is invariably a painful event, always at the expense of some. Whatever were the political, economic and cultural conditions that made them necessary, over time their advance caused a world of customs, rites, religious practices, dialects or even languages and their sum total, cultures to vanish, or rather brought inaptly together under one constructed yoke of nation, reducing culture down to an “idea of culture”—to put it in Nietzschean terms.

The exhibition we propose takes this invented and imagined nature of nationhood as its point of departure. Everyday, millions of people are promised unity under such tools as the flag, or the marked dates of a calendar (the monuments of collective memory or consciousness, as Walter Benjamin called them), or a map (which often cuts through people and geographies so forcefully that their absurdity are overshadowed by the wounds they open). To these we can add the news delivered to us by newspapers, TV and radio broadcasts from the four corners of the nation, which in most cases has nothing common other than the mere fact that they take place on the same day. And above all there is language, homogenized and formalized with the help of publishing press and its tyranny of “correct spelling.”

Our aim, with this prospective collection of works is to demonstrate the deep-seated absurdity that inhere in the concrete processes of nation-making as well as nation-keeping. We aim to bring together artists who utilize these very tools (and others) to play at the line between the truth and fiction of nation. Some of the artists we have thought for this collection are already treading on this line. Graeme Walker, a Brighton, UK based English artist has long been calling himself “a country”—among other things. Among his works are the recent foundation of a pebble museum in Brighton, establishment of a national park in Nieuwolda (Netherlands) and designing a national flag for Vlaggenmuseum in Rotterdam (Netherlands). Marton & Larré, a Romanian-Spanish duo based in New York and working predominantly with video and photography, have been igniting inconspicuous revolutions and forming micro-republics at the end of New York subway lines for numerous years. Their latest work on Far Rockaway portrays this remote New York neighborhood and its inhabitants ingeniously as an independent country. Hafriyat, a collective out of Istanbul, has attracted attention with their alternative election posters in Turkey last summer. Their redesigned ads, flags, logos, and posters mischievously and critically mimicked the bizarre visual language of the hegemonic neo-liberal nationalism in Turkey. Olgu Aytaç, a Turkish architect based in New York, who has been reading/writing/working on and with the theory of art and architecture, will contribute to this proposed collection by inventing a national architectural style. While our search for such artists is still in effect, we aim to commission works as well, such as instructional videos for invented folk dances, national anthems that aim to invoke no patriotic (or any) feeling in the listener or calendars marking trivial events. Once put together, we believe this collection will be a strong statement uttered in a minor-political, poetic tone.

*Sister Sivas, Brother Aintab picture (on which a Surplus Thought entry will follow soon) is by Nese Karamursel.