Versus Art Project, a popular contemporary art gallery based in Istanbul, has participated in the second edition of Senkron 2022, offering synchronized video exhibitions, with an online selection titled “Undertow” this year.
Senkron aims to make videos more visible as an art medium and expand its scope with the wider participation of different art components in the next years. Seizing the opportunity created by the event to focus on video art, Versus Art Project encourages art enthusiasts to question the place of digital motion pictures in contemporary art with its video series.
Featuring works by Alper Aydın, Sena Başöz, Yelta Köm, Metehan Özcan and Sibel Horada, the selection focuses on revealing the potential of video art through its relations with other art fields, such as poetry, stories, painting, sculpture, cinema and documentaries. Putting the trendiness of video art aside, the series sets off from the bond that digital technology created between art and life today.
The online selection begins with Aydın’s 2015 video titled “Phreatic.” Opening with a scene from a routine trip of a ferry between two sides in Istanbul, the video continues with the waves and foams left by the engine in the sea as the ship moves away from the shore. While the camera zooms in on these waves, the scene slowly turns red, reminding us of magma, with a little technical intervention. I should accept that I was petrified after witnessing the color change on the screen as it evoked a feeling of a blood bath. However, the waves turn into flames in seconds, implying the relationship between water and fire. After the flames dance on the sea for a while, the name of the video starts to make sense. Phreatic, which has the freshness of the moment magma touches the groundwater, has a place in both hydrology and volcanology.
The second video by Özcan is a piece from the artist’s “Dekor” (“Decor”) series, which he describes as a video sketch. In this sketch, he allows scenes from western Izmir province to flow over. The work does not come across as something technical. On the contrary, Özcan is just browsing with his camera as images flow in front of him, showing us many details like the eucalyptus and palm trees, which were brought to Izmir in the 1930s, and the dirty water flowing under the train bridge in Kahramanlar and Alsancak.
After the huge influence of water and flow in the very first two videos, Başöz’s 30-minute video “Time Worm” introduces us to a village house where silk is farmed in the Kulp district of southeastern Diyarbakır province. Calling her video a “creative documentary,” the artist actually tells us a tale from Anatolian lands. As the family and the future of their children depend on the condition of the silkworms, the insects are fed well. The silkworms, which continuously work and produce, die at the hands of humans before turning into moths but become a source of life for other species. However, if the silkworms spun a cocoon for the sole purpose of spending their life as insects, then they would be true slaves, like all people in the capitalist system.
Following Başöz’s video, which makes us contemplate the existing system via a natural element that has turned into an industry, Horada also takes us on a journey into the ecosystem of corals. “Migration Wave” presents exiled corals that can no longer blend with the sea. Attempts are made to keep the coral family alive with a system comprising of plastic pipes and containers – similar to an intensive care unit – inside the Heybeliada Seminary. While viewers witness the last breath of these beautiful creatures, it is interesting that the artist has chosen school desks that no longer have students to mourn for them. While corals die as a result of man's violence to the world, these invertebrates also remind us of the people who are displaced from their homelands and try to hold on to life in other places.
In the last video of the series, Köm welcomes viewers with “It is an elegy for all possibilities – Part I.” With a voice-over, words and logos of today pour into the same sea with the myths of prehistoric times. In the video, sound and images blend first and turn into prophecies. Transforming into knowledge, they finally become laments.
The works viewers see in “Undertow” use the technique as a method of touching the bottom of vitality. As artists oscillate between the abstract and the concrete, the animate and the dead, the shaped and the formless, the rational and the irrational, they breathe new life into the digital image. The online selection can be visited until May 22.
