View from the exhibition “hard to die” in Berlin 2007
‘ hard to die ‘, video installation /2 Projected films
duration:8′ 11
Film related to the ‘Restore Hope ‘ Project about honor killings
Images of flight by spiritual refugees
- Evrim Altug*
- Storyboards of ‘Board stories’ that spiritual refugees had made of
The series by Selda Asal entitled ‘Restore Hope’consists of five works created since 2004 and questions the paradoxical reality of life and of the individual via video installations of great psychoanalytical depth. This is an individual research project which started off as a work of art.
This is not a stance Asal is unfamiliar with, and she does not assume it simply for the sake of being controversial. A long time before she decided to become an artist, when she was about 10, Asal started to ‘conserve’ sound recordings of her acquaintances and inventories of mass killings and massacres; what we are talking about here is a determined character, interested in the ecopsychology surrounding her.
Created with an empathy both analytical and critical, Asal’s latest series ‘Restore Hope’ deals with people who have experienced life on the brink of death to such a degree that they have nearly lost their ability to even imagine a future for themselves.
Lasting eight minutes and ten seconds, this video narrative by Selda Asal, the last in a series of five works, is entitled ‘Hard to Die’ It was first screened in Belgrade and later shown in Berlin.
This documentary-like video installation starts suddenly, almost as if reported from a war front, and is presented by the ‘internal voice’ of the artist. As in other work by Asal, the aesthetics of this work exists through its reality and its content. According to Asal, the structure of the sounds and images she has collected, as well as the way those moments have affected the artist, constitute the backbone of the works.
In this work Selda Asal deals not with displaced people, who are the subject of many art works, but with people who have been displaced by others; each of these people, who come from different social classes, narrates the tragedy of ‘the other urban refugees’
As the work is screened simultaneously on two large screens, in two languages, it encompasses the fragmented narratives of a traditional, genuine, and anonymous tragedy; women living in various parts of Turkey are placed in the middle of this tragedy, while on its periphery lies the male dominated/patriarchal tradition and the so-called honor violence which encloses these women on all sides.
Selda Asal’s work is based not on emotional exploitation or on so-called re-enactions, or thoughtless and cheap dramatic effects, but on a narrative based on documents and observation, free of any artist commentary. Gestures, sounds, and intimacy are featured continuously in the foreground of the work.
In order to create this poignant work, which is infused with a scorching sense of urgency and concern, Asal visited ‘Women’s Shelters ‘in many cities. The artist, who functions as a kind of a mediator, witnessed the pain of women who have been forced to live under different identities and in different addresses, and who have actually been displaced within their environments and made into spiritual/emotional refugees.
All of the animated drawings in the videos belong to women who have been abused both sexually and in terms of their identity, and who have been deprived of their rights and freedoms. The greatest fear of these women, who have managed to find refuge in the women’s shelters, is to be discovered and recognized by the senior members of their families or by male relatives who intend to kill the
The majority of the women come from families who were victims of the forced displacement of the mid- 1980s in Turkey, which was based on economic and political reasons, and who were suddenly made to live in large cities.
Forced to live in confined spaces and within a traditional and insular lifestyle, the women generally resort to ‘living’ in these houses because of the abuse and violence they are subjected to at home.
This is where the ‘honor’ tradition makes its appearance. According to sociological data, the members of a ‘clan’ or of a family that is generally of Arab, African, or Kurdish origin and numbers between 100-200 individuals, do not let their daughters marry outside the clan, and this insular situation creates the basis for crimes aiming to protect the family’s ‘honor’
And it is situations such as rape, incest, forced marriages, and abductions that form the background of these women’s stories, narrated here by Asal.
In some extreme situations, in order not to become the executor of the punishment or simply to avoid legal repercussions, families sometimes choose to encourage the women deemed guilty to punish themselves or even to commit suicide.
Sometimes women are presented with instruments of death ranging from medicines to ropes, from guns to sharp instruments, and are expected to use those instruments upon themselves in order to restore the honor of the family or clan. It is at this point that the women desperately attempt to escape their homes.
These details, which frequently appear in Asal’s videos both vocally and visually, send chills down one’s spine. The fact that we do not know the faces or identities of these women, some of which had to escape without saying goodbye to their children, is important from two points of view: first of all, the artist imparts to the viewer’s conscience the duty to perceive and interpret the whole of the geographical and sociological picture that she has scattered throughout the work, via these fragments of vocal and plastic stories.
Secondly, the risk that the identities of these women, who have been deprived of their names, should be revealed, along with the reality of their consequent need for security intersect with Asal’s sense of humane and ethical responsibility.
Through this ethically concerned and critical style, the artist avoids reifying the stories that embody the ‘subject’ and she also manages to render visible a very serious issue, via the triangle of arts, ethics, and aesthetics, without putting the stories themselves at risk.
Once filtered through the prism of an intermediate surface consisting of narrative, bodily movements, and the women’s imagination, the original pictures, the only material that Asal uses, project onto a white sheet of paper the psycho-iconography of the scene we see, with an unexaggerated but tension inducing anxiety.
The pictures produced by the women who own the stories present a striking choice of colors such as black, red, and white, which have clear and universal meanings.
The white sheet of paper frequently overlaps with the dreams and the disappointments in the pictures accompanying the stories, and the exaggerated presentation of the sound of the drawing increases the harshness of the traces that the narrative engraves upon the memory.
The women, who shed silent tears, place the phallic, huge, micro ‘power’ knives and the guns in the middle of the paper. They feel the need to write ‘our lives are ruined because of you’ or even ‘we are the living dead’ in faint letters, in a corner of that same paper.
They are the surreal painters of suffering so intense that it cannot be real.
It is clearly visible from the pictures the women draw that their pens and their eyes bleed. The identity crises they experience can easily be perceived from the clothes and wedding dresses hanging on the empty sheets of paper, but it is difficult to digest these images. In one of these pictures a bride with a small face, a huge wedding dress, a black veil, and a red ribbon, floating in the void, watches the viewers from above her tomb and the tombstone engraved with the causes of her death. This is followed by a woman who is surrounded by a composition consisting of a snake symbol, a kite, and a crucifix, and by slogans full of anger, directed at a former spouse.
Another woman, grieving because she was forced to abandon her child, entrusting it to God, and thus cutting short her own motherhood, turns her back to the paper, and moves towards an unknown and fluctuating border.
Selda Asal’s work ‘Hard to Die’ actually evokes a forensic study of pictures which consecutively identify a primitive, patriarchal mentality that invades the personality and the bodies of women who have been exiled from their lives and experience suffering of a kind that we have never seen before. It is hard to ignore such evidence.
And having watched this work, it is hard to continue leading a carefree life.
Evrim Altug* Member of AICA – Turkey, Journalist.
