Under My Skin
The Memory of Skin
‘’The body is outside me, because it can be exposed to the effects of the world and be visible to others, because I can abstract myself from it, if to a certain degree. But on the other hand, it is the closest thing to myself, at the heart of intimacy: It touches me most deeply, it touches me at ‘my skin’. The body is that which belongs both the most and the least to me.’’1
In the exhibition Under My Skin, Ayça Telgeren steps out of the dream time that she has been focusing on in her previous exhibitions and inquires into the memory of the skin. The artist’s treatment of paper no longer bears a vulnerable, delicate incorporeality; it rests on how the hands that she brings out of her memory hold on to each other with all their reality. In the time of this exhibition, the short hair of her imaginary character Mireille grows like her own hair, and turns into sculpture-like monuments that have been set free and braided. Concrete sculptures, bodies and the skin room invite one to reflect on touching oneself, one’s own body, feeling pleasure and remembering the people one has touched.
“Contact” forms the symbolic framework of the exhibition Under My Skin.
Every body part and element in the exhibition touches the others, intertwined in an embrace. The hand and the skin are prominent in the philosophy of the touch. The skin is the geography of touching, and the hand is the most relevant body part for the act. We begin to learn and feel with our hands. Often, we perceive what we discover with our hands as if it were our entire body. Abidin Dino makes the following remarks about his drawings of hands: “The fingers on the paper became detached from anatomical logic and swarmed by themselves. They were autonomous, the fingers were self-ordained, they could twist and bend on the empty paper snuggling up as they wished, like a tughra”2. We can say the exact opposite for Telgeren’s hands. Far from being autonomous, they are hands that almost seem to exist for the other hands they touch, that touch each other with compassion; hands whose lines intermingle, which tell of the accretion of the past, of moments. These hands take refuge in one another, without intending at all to describe the character of the person they belong to as in Dino’s case, and get lost in the warmth of that moment.
With this exhibition, the artist invites us to remember with hands. In the work titled Corpus of Memory, Telgeren shows us only the hands of anonymized family members cut out of family photos at their moments of touching each other. We can identify certain hands as belonging to a baby, and others as women’s or men’s hands, but what matters is the uniqueness and ephemerality of the moment. All the hands touch each other, making a map of the most precious memories of the artist. The art of memory is formed through imaginary spaces3. And here, Telgeren creates an imaginary geography of remembering, into which we can place our own memories, our own history. Two pairs of hands that differ from the paper cutouts stand out in the exhibition. In Eternal, the artist embroiders the figure of two hands holding each other, a love that will remain for eternity, on a pillowcase with the technique of hair embroidery, an ancient tradition.
In all civilizations of the past, hair has great significance for the expression of identity. People have left various kinds of markings on bodies to designate the boundaries of its identity: Tattoos, body painting and mutilation, ornaments, ethnic garments, etc.4 All these elements are used to delimit the other and express oneself.
The use of hair is among such signs used in societies since the earliest civilizations. Hair has particular importance in Telgeren’s life and work. In her previous exhibitions, we encounter the character Mireille. In her childhood, Telgeren’s hair was cut short by her family against her will. The artist identifies this situation with Mireille, an imaginary character of her creation with short bob-cut hair and introduces her in her work as the main character. The deprivation of a visible part of the body has been perceived as a symbol of dishonor by societies of the past. “Mutilar”, the origin of the word “mutiler”, which means “to injure”, used to denote the cutting of hair in the early 16th century.
In the Byzantine period, women who raised a hand against people other than their sons were punished by cutting their hair.5 In Turkish mythology, having long, black hair is the symbol of power and beauty. The deliberate cutting of hair, on the other hand, is symbolic of mourning. In past Turkish traditions, women’s braided hair carries multiple meanings. A single braid and multiple braid bear different connotations; here, Hair has particular importance in Telgeren’s life and work. In her previous exhibitions, we encounter the character Mireille. In her childhood, Telgeren’s hair was cut short by her family against her will. The artist identifies this situation with Mireille, an imaginary character of her creation with short bob-cut hair and introduces her in her work as the main character. The deprivation of a visible part of the body has been perceived as a symbol of dishonor by societies of the past. “Mutilar”, the origin of the word “mutiler”, which means “to injure”, used to denote the cutting of hair in the early 16th century. In the Byzantine period, women who raised a hand against people other than their sons were punished by cutting their hair.5 In Turkish mythology, having long, black hair is the symbol of power and beauty. The deliberate cutting of hair, on the other hand, is symbolic of mourning. In past Turkish traditions, women’s braided hair carries multiple meanings. A single braid and multiple braid bear different connotations; here, hair, as the bearer of such cultural signs as being or not being married and having recently given birth, helps the body be deciphered without words6. In this exhibition, Telgeren’s monumental strands of hair, long, braided and black, are no longer parts of a body, and instead speak with an alphabet of their own. In this exhibition, the artist was inspired by George Bataille’s Story of the Eye, published in 1928, which tells the narrator and Simone’s erotic adventures. Starting off like a simple game, this erotic adventure explores the boundlessness of morality, touching all aspects of evil with a language that simplifies it and renders it ordinary.
The two main characters in the story live for the pleasures of their bodies; this desire is strong enough to also affect the groups of people around them. Telgeren remarks that this story has influenced her in two ways, the first being how the boundaries of the bodies of others in the story disappear and the skins exist with their touching of each other, turning into a single body, an island of pleasure that has a life of its own. We can see a reflection of this notion in Telgeren’s work titled The Last Day of Spring, where two separate intertwined bodies turn into a single body, and in the series titled Islands, painted with acrylic on canvas. The second aspect of influence is Bataille’s inquiry into the concepts of morality and evil in the story. The artist remarks that “Bataille’s outlook on immorality, his relation with evil, rests deep in the essence of humanity”, and touches on how “the duality of morality and evil are constantly intertwined so as to both affirm and nullify one another”. These are the notions that underlie Telgeren’s sculpture Vague in this exhibition, regarding which the artist remarks on double meanings: “An entity may need to be embraced both threateningly and like a baby. With an appearance cold as concrete, yet light like a bird, it can create a sense of compassion and touch. The perception of the work can change with regard to whether one stands in front of or behind the trigger, or the sculpture can be read like a hand hanging in the air, away from all these thoughts.”7 Vague is the only work in this exhibition that stands on its own. The work can symbolize this intellectual inquiry and conflict thanks to its solitude, in contrast with the rest of the works.
In the sculptures titled The First Day of Spring and The Last Day of Spring, when we study each hand in Corpus of Memory, in the places where the strands of the Hair series touch each other and are braided together, we witness that the touch that occurs bears an internal tension in which duality, and at times multitude is embodied. This is what constitutes the power of painting and sculpture8. That moment of contact, as in real life, is the meeting point and the concentration of a clash in a single space.
It is the skin that bears the history of the touch. The skin and the hair remember these moments of intense contact. Our skin shivers when we recall our memories back into our minds. The traces of those moments in the past reverberate in the geography of our bodies once again. In the video installation titled Under My Skin, Telgeren creates a space where the intensity of moments of clashing, touch and embrace is muted. Puddles of rain flow like the remembering of the skin. In his book The Visible and the Invisible, Maurice Merleau-Ponty remarks on the relationship of the skin with time: “The past and present are Ineinander, each enveloping-enveloped— and that itself is the flesh.”9 From the touch of our mother which we carry from our birth to our present, to the touch of a lover, from our hair being caressed to a warm embrace, the skin of others touching our lives intersects our own. As we remember their touch, our present body fades into the past, and even though they may be gone, their traces on our skin and their touch remains with us, throughout our lives.
With the exhibition Under My Skin, Ayça Telgeren invites us to reflect anew on everyone who has touched us, whom we are keeping in our desolate bodies, in our skins.
1 Renaud Barbaras, Vücudun Fenomenolojisinden Tenin Ontolojisine, Cogito, Sayı 88,Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2017, s.154-155.
2 Abidin Dino, Eller, Sel Yayıncılık, 2005, s. 41
3 Jan Assmann, Kültürel Bellek, Ayrıntı Yayınları, 2015, s. 68
4 Jan Assmann, Kültürel Bellek, Ayrıntı Yayınları, 2015, sf. 162-163
5 Christiane Noireau, L’esprit des Cheveux: Chevelures, poils et barbes, mythes et croyances, L’apart: L’esprit de la création, 2009, s. 218-223
6 Filiz N. Ölmez, Türk Kültüründe Saça Değin Simgesel ve Alegorik Değerlendirme, Halk Kültürü ve Araştırmalar Kurumu, 2016, s. 182.
7 Bu paragraftaki tüm alıntılar, sanatçı ile yapılan 19 Aralık 2019 tarihli görüşmedendir.
8 John Berger Ressamlığın ve Heykeltraşlığın Temeli Çizimdir makalesinde, kağıt üzerindeki çizimde, çizilen bedenin gerilim noktasına değinir. John Berger, Manzaralar, Metis Yayınları, 2019, s. 43.
9 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le Visible et l’Invisible, suivi de notes de travail, Paris, Gallimard, 1964, s.315 aktaran Zeynep Zafer Esenyel, Merleau-Ponty Vücudun Fenomolijisiyle Zihin-Beden Dualizmi Aşılabilir mi?, Cogito sayı:88, Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2017, s. 120.
News
