The immense cognitive and material scope of Emre Hüner’s exhibition in Gallery 1 of Arter, Istanbul’s flagship contemporary art museum, is titled, ‘[Elektroisolazyon]: Unknown Parameter Extro-Record’
At its most conceptually freewheeling and historically avant-garde, the experience of bewilderment that contemporary art can instill is tantamount to living behind a language barrier. With only fragments of understanding, and subject to frames of exclusivity, at once mimetic when not entirely opaque, the harrowing charge of postmodern artists is that they prop up veils of obscurity so dense and wavering that it seems their purpose is to provoke mass confusion ad absurdum.
But if there is a payoff to their wily games, it is that they have achieved in straining out of the indiscernibly diverse public of proudly individual citizens a dissonant chorus of original, critical thinkers who might stay for awhile, and play along. The dizzying cacophony of objectified objects that Emre Hüner has laid out within the whitewashed, sterile museum air in Istanbul’s industrial quarter of Dolapdere evokes an unsettling, dystopian mood. Together with the radical curation of Aslı Seven, "[Elektroisolazyon]" is a puzzle of mind-eye coordination.
Like the general trends of fellow conceptualists currently at work within often seamlessly integrated installation-based artwork, metaphysically site-specific, and drifting into transcendent semiotics of form, Hüner has engendered a catalogue of multidisciplinary acts of mediumistic creativity. In brief, there is an obstacle course of sculptures, 3D printed mutations of mechanical organisms, an amphibian genesis of utility and imagination, all encircling the embedded emplacement of a 5-hour-plus black-and-white film and a science fiction book.
When thinking about "[Elektroisolazyon]," the question arises, simply, of where to begin. Any potential of narrative order is as confounding as the shapes of its many and varied sculptural elements that appear to be bound only by a fragmented, alphabetical aesthetic. There is, for example, a vast, three-legged construction pillar, the likes of which might be seen under the foundation of a newly excavated behemoth high-rise, or by the side of a highway slated to slice a continent.
If a message might be gleaned from a first impression into Gallery 1 of Arter during "[Elektroisolazyon]" it is that someone’s productions are underway. What seers step through is the artlessness of an artistic process. It is plausible to presume that Hüner is exhibiting a venturesome figment of his intellectual obsession with industrialization’s effect on society, as if the assembly line in a factory of parts had imploded and he went the next day to collect what interested him most intuitively, bit by bit, reassembling towards an end as illogical as its start.
And time is up
According to its exhibition guide text, "[Elektroisolazyon]" is not based on, but mediated by a revolutionary exercise in scriptwriting. Whereas filmmaking is sometimes regarded as the quintessentially holistic vehicle by which to express the myriad paths of human creativity, including visual art, performance, drama and music, among other outlets of inspiration, whittling its inner workings down to the technicalities of the screenplay, and how that might be extrapolated on in concrete terms is, conceivably, Hüner’s in-context raison d’être.
The mad wizardry of disparate items ranges from an odd-numbered line of shoes to a motorcycle helmet, a cash register, manikin heads, gas canisters, scuba gear, flippers, pumps, among countless indistinguishable components. Many of the more quotidian, distinctly perceivable configurations are repeated although covered, discolored and deformed with various layers of epoxy, molds and casts. They are connected by twisted, geometrically inventive workings of poles and panels that make up the installation, "Anoxic Event" (2021).
In the language of Arter’s highfalutin curation, "[Elektroisolazyon]" could be critiqued as nothing more than a self-serving, oblique laboratory by which those who are in the know might sit back and talk amongst themselves in the spirit of a cerebral circus, traveling not so much like medieval troubadours but as futuristic scholars through hyperspace, inside caravans of institutions that stop to unpack along the rarified fringes of the Eurocentric art world. Such an image is not totally unfounded in the course of Hüner’s bemusing fictive output.
The pieces of short fiction that accompany the exhibition are by one, Meliha Erdem, whose biographical sketch at the opening of the slim, 26-page volume is as unconvincing as the sequences of science-fiction writing within the body of its surrealistic prose. There is a curious interplay at work, however, in its presentation along with that of a film, where the mental modalities of text is confined, itself, to more open interpretation as opposed to the multilayered objectivity of onscreen appearances.
After all is said
A flat monitor held up by a metallic contraption of hollow, bare rails screens the film, "[Elektroisolazyon]," during which there is a semi-bucolic scene with a character who looks to be someone unhoused, wearing a hoodie over a baseball cap, picking through what is likely a pile of trash. But they grab a piece of it, and seem quite convicted, carrying it over grassy hillocks before the mise en scène cuts to the courtyard of a derelict building, the camera still behind a gridded fence. The distant character is heaving the thing they ostensibly took by a rope.
The inexplicability of the film’s succession intensifies inside a massive, industrial factory, where an old man stands beside a woman wearing a plastic, transparent raincoat. There is a well-framed closeup of the eccentric duo. The man wears a face of bafflement, holding a transistor radio. The woman does not avert her steady, almost inhuman gaze, as she stares blankly into the distance. Other parts of the film are reminiscent of a past exhibition at Arter by filmmaker Rosa Barba, "The Hidden Conference," showing the backrooms of art collections.
There is an aesthetic affinity to 20th century visual criticisms of cultural modernism and its mechanically reproductive discontents throughout Hüner’s multiform installation where a wall shows a series of prints after the work of Dutch graphic designer Wim Crouwel, particularly his 1967 typeface, "New Alphabet." When seen alone, the nine pieces on display could be as dissociative as the rest of the outwardly fragmentary exhibition, but when visioned within the show’s recurring motifs, pairing and merging organic matter with industrial products, they are complementary to the overall tone of "[Elektroisolazyon]."