Metropolis and money-making subjects of new Istanbul exhibition

I had spent around five minutes at Fahrettin Örenli's solo show "High Heels" when the lights at Istanbul's DEPO gallery, where the show continues until Oct. 9, suddenly went off, leaving me in the dark in front of a video installation featuring a huge parrot. In the silence of the large gallery, the colorful animal eyed me intensely before turning its back and moving out of the frame. A few meters away, sculptures of huge skyscrapers from world capitals were placed on a table, illuminated under a spotlight. When the gallery was illuminated again, after a three-minute long dark break, I realized that this was an intentional part of the show.

Örenli, a graduate of Gerrit Rietveld Academie and Rijksakademie Van Beeldende Kunsten, has made a name for himself on the international art scene with a number of shows and residencies; he was in New York in 2003 for the International Studio and Curatorial Program and three years later was awarded the Royal Painting Prize in Amsterdam, the city where he lives. Örenli went on to win the prestigious ABN AMRO Art Prize in 2004. His works are in numerous world famous collections, including ABN-AMRO, De Heus collection, AMC, Erasmus University Rotterdam and The Vehbi Koç Foundation.

In "High Heels" Örenli focuses on the metropolitan city and how it had turned into an organic, living structure that carries mass information through its structures: new skyscrapers, shopping malls and roads that keep on popping up in different parts of the metropolis. The other theme of the show is money and what Örenli calls "creative processes of money making."

"In the commercialized, profit-production era, the biggest refined measurement to build our values or knowledge is absolutely money and this has been taking place in mainly cities," the exhibition catalog reads. "Therefore, cities grow as indestructible and self - regenerating organic and they refine information from their center to suburbs alongside centuries. However, the refining process happens to be mostly profitable, commercial knowledge. If so, as we live in cities and become part of them, how do we refine our knowledge and develop? How does each individual living in cities also carry commercial knowledge in this time that we are in? Theoretically, if each individual carries commercial knowledge and desires to be successful in the city, one needs to be different and create new ways to enter the closed door of the established market."

"Today modern cities are psychologically and physically shaped into a complex entity into which information deriving from other habitats is assimilated," Örenli told Daily Sabah in a written interview last week. "I search for new ways in which aspects of life, nature, and the urban environment fuse to form a new reality. Phenomena such as grafting or plastic surgery, which recur repeatedly in my work, stand as a symbol for the way in which humans have taken the upper hand over nature in order to create a new reality and new cities. As I was born in, and personally experienced rural areas, I live with the same rules in cities today. Being an observer for a visual artist is very crucial to understanding and questioning what is surrounding us now and in the future. But I believe that one could not dare dismantling the metropolis."

For Örenli one of the first things that opened his eyes to the subject had been Rocinante, Don Quixote's horse. "It was about not going against windmills because I believe that not only me but no one will be able to dismantle it and if we attempt to do we will lose not only ourselves in this war," he said. "Metropolises are unconquerable monstrous living beings, monsters made up of 'us,' and they are flattening our knowledge into one. The best thing that we can do is 'to understand the beauty of the monster's soul, the money.'"

The atmosphere of Örenli's exhibition reminded me of a jungle but then most of the artifacts in it were related to cities. The suggestion being that the two entities had by now been intertwined. "It has already been centuries that humans built its own jungles/cities in accordance with their own human nature and grew them so big they became living giant organic structures," the exhibition catalog reads. "To survive or adapt in these jungles/cities, humans created bigger walls, bigger rules, bigger illusions and bigger information pollution. 'High Heels' investigates how humanity became blinded and lost in human made nature, hypnotized by the power of synthetic sunset placed on the horizon or rather ignore to recognize it due to various economic interests."

When asked about the parrot in the video installation, Örenli replied with a poem, "The Parrot, the People" that is on display in the exhibition. It reads: "the parrot was taught / only one word / which it learned perfectly / and went on repeating / all through its life / indifferent to everything else / and never learning a new one / to go above and beyond its duty / repeating that one word was enough: 'the people.'" As for the title of the show, "High Heels," Örenli is apparently referring to a Turkish literature classic. "I referred to the 'Story of High Heels' by Ömer Seyfettin to reflect the critical and meaningful voices through intelligent satire humor," he said. "'We know our problems but we do not want to face, so we avoid them'... I believe the main message of the story 'High Heels' reflects a common problem of societies of different corners of the world in contemporary life."