FANTASY & ISLAND - FRAC Corse

FANTASY & ISLAND, An exhibition about "somewhere only we know"

Curated by Celenk Bafra, Adnan Yildiz, Anne Alessandri

Artists: : Can Altay, Asli Cavusoglu, Verana Costa, Elie Cristiani, Hakima El Djoudi, Leyla Gediz, Liam Gillick, Dan Graham, Gabriel Orozco, Sener Özmen & Cenzig Tekin, Christodoulos Panayiotou, Gael Peltier, David Raffini.

05.03.2010-31.05.2010

FRAC Corse

The island is what the sea surrounds and what we travel around. It
is like an egg. An egg of the sea, it is round. It is as though the island had
pushed its desert outside. What is deserted is the ocean around it.
Gilles Deleuze

The country is first of all the space of a land considered from a certain corner or angle, a corner delimited by some natural or cultural feature (as one says when one thinks one can tell the difference): a row of trees or a road, a river or a ridge, a pass, a glacial constriction, a formation of alluvial deposits, a passing herd or an armed horde, an encampment.
Jean-Luc Nancy

“Fantasy & Island” is triggered by an institutional dialogue between Istanbul and Corsica on the occasion of the Cultural Season of Turkey in France. Initiated by a collective curatorial approach, the project is designed as a process based exhibition, which transforms some contemporary forms of artistic organizations such as residency, collection and exhibition on a Mediterranean island. Conceptually, it departs from the reality of its location, and the physicality of being based on an island as a psychological, social, cultural, literal and metaphorical levels of discussion, and brings a selection of works that reflects the diverse dimensions of island as a “ground for image.” Referring to Jean-Luc Nancy’s recent work, “The Ground of the Image”, which focuses on the split between image, imagination, and uncanny landscape, the exhibition project aims to transform its venue, Frac Corse into an experience of island as a conceptual entity.
The artist residencies in Istanbul and Corsica have operated as pilot studies of an intercultural dialogue; four artists have bridged these two different contexts through their body of work and approach of study. As resident artists for Istanbul; Gael Peltier‘s performative work investigates the borders of stage and stage-personality through different narrative forms, and his focus on the context of this exhibition brings an insider-outsider’s gaze into a transparent dialogue with the audience, whereas Hakima el Djoudi creates a monument as a critical form of political representation linking the militarist regimes with the economical structures, also specifically developing a new version for the Corsica show with Turkish Liras. Istanbul based painter Leyla Gediz’s drawings and a painting –products of her residency at Ajaccio- compose an installation that narrates a triangle for a happily ever after story; a personal attachment with a kid size shoe, a flashback memory of an interior landscape from the island, and a conceptual joke with a found object. Another resident artist in Ajaccio, Can Altay reconstructs social forms of life for developing conceptual relationships between the architectural and structural elements of mobility and communication, and translating them into specific forms of imaginative island(s) that floats on the ground of the space.

In order to relate the conception of the project to the institutional heritage of its institution, the curatorial strategy invites several art works from the collection of Frac Corse, such as Şener Özmen & Cengiz Tekin’s “Bonjour Monsieur Courbet”, a collaborative video work as parody of an art historical representation, Liam Gillick’s “Discussion Island Platform”, an abstracted form of a critical discourse about discussion platforms, Gabriel Orozco’s image of a parachute landing on Iceland, and Dan Graham’s sculpture that crystallizes a conceptual abstraction of the relation between inside and outside.

Is island a piece of land that is surrounded by water or is it surrounded by itself as reflection of its epistemological/ontological entity? Is it reflected on itself or is it reflexive itself?

In order to respond to some of these questions, with the first hand experience through a form of life on an island as an inhabitant, witness or storyteller, more artists contribute to the exhibition process. Christodoulos Panayiotou displays a selection of images from the historical archives of Limassol, Cyprus from Disney Parades since 70’s. As an outcome of Aslı Çavuşoğlu’s collaboration with a Turkish rapper the audience is confronted by an installation of the official documents, LP, and a sound system that plays the song titled “191/205” -written with 191 (including “revolution”, “equal”, “whole”) of in total 205 words that were censored by the national TV channel, TRT (Turkish National TV & Radio) –right after the coup d’état (1980). A young Corsican artist Verana Costa’s video work is a resistance against constraint; in the video the repetition of interrupted breathing creates a sensation of oppression as well as a concentrated energy, whereas David Raffini’s paintings can be considered as artistic expressions that redefine the psychological territory of his presence on the island. Ajaccio based artist Elie Cristiani reverses the perspective of a passerby –upside down, and ironically frames how everyday life is publicly circulated on an island.

Bringing together a selection of art works, which are produced at some islands such as Corsica, Iceland and Cyprus, or related with contexts such as Diyarbakır or Istanbul -in association with the island metaphor, “Fantasy & Island” deals with the physical conditions of living on an island; forms of isolation, mobility and attachment, which are decoding the physicality of an island, besides political and cultural connotations of closed systems of ideological control and repressive regulation -such as censorship issue and Turkey in the 80’s or 70’s isolated Cyprus under global attacks.

Ending up at an island brings endless possibilities that could happen at the same time with an unbalanced form of co-existence; joy or tension, imprisonment and emancipation, isolation or intimacy, farewell or arrival… As a ground for the images of today’s islanders, “Fantasy &Island” is an exhibition about the territorial power and limits of control; what surrounds us, and what we are surrounded with; and somewhere only we know…