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Off-White Tulips is an intimate, meditative, and tender essay-film composed as a fictional exchange between Black gay writer James Baldwin and the artist, Aykan Safoglu. The work is primarily structured around Magdalena J. Zaborowska’s scholarly reconstitution of Baldwin’s self-imposed exile in Istanbul, Ankara, and Bodrum between 1961 and 1971, as well as autobiographical notes and intimations gathered throughout the years. Safoglu produced Off-White Tulips early on in his career when he was in the process of acquiring permanent residency in Germany. The work weaves archival photographs depicting Baldwin throughout his decade living in Turkey (which was as productive as it was strenuous) with portraits of the artist and his family, including some which document the country’s oil boom and its first national entry in the Eurovision competition. As the film progressively unfolds, a speculative filiation is formed between the two figures through historical anecdotes, visual juxtapositions, and poetic interventions, inviting the viewer to ponder on alternative modes of performing kinship and thinking about inheritance.
Aykan Safoglu is a Turkish-German artist whose works cultivate relationships among cultural, geographical, linguistic, and temporal boundaries. Through his work in multiple media—including film, photography, and performance—he conducts open-ended investigations into the formation and performance of cultural identities, intellectual labor, and alternative modes of kinship. Safo?lu adopts an idiosyncratic approach towards the archive that I believe should be distinguished for its ability to be driven by a desire to listen to and be in tune with queer counter-histories and narratives from the margins. His process has consistently revolved around contemplating, reworking, and challenging performance and literary practices of the Turkish and Euro-American avant-garde (Jean Genet, Ulay, James Baldwin); it is one of excavation built around the aesthetic references and individual trajectories being engaged with and commemorated. For the 2020 Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art, Safoglu mobilized his own position as an immigrant in Germany as well as years of scholarly research in the service of a haunting work, Zero Deficit (In Refusal), which exposes Germany’s complex relationship to Asia Minor at the turn of the twentieth century.
Glorie #7 by Caspar Heinemann is made from cardboard boxes in which the artist received deliveries at home during lockdown, as well as other materials that he uses in an improvisatory way...
Memory Mistake of the Eldridge Cleaver Pants was created for the show Paul McCarthy’s Low Life Slow Life Part 1 , held at California College of the Arts’s Wattis Institute in 2008 and curated by McCarthy himself...
Kubra Khademi’s work celebrates the female body and in her detailed drawings and paintings she portrays female bodies floating on white paper...
Kubra Khademi’s work celebrates the female body and in her detailed drawings and paintings she portrays female bodies floating on white paper...
In Amapola Prada’s work Movement, we see three spotlit, female bodies lying inert in a darkened room, alongside three dressed, standing figures holding long, wooden spoons...
Immolation I is taken from the four-part Immolation series which shows four Arab revolutionaries who publicly sacrificed themselves through self-immolation and in so doing heralded the beginning of the Arab Spring...
Untitled is a work on paper by Martin Kippenberger comprised of several seemingly disparate elements: cut-out images of a group of dancers, a japanese ceramic vase, and a pair of legs, are all combined with gestural, hand-drawn traces and additional elements such as a candy wrapper from a hotel in Monte Carlo and a statistical form from a federal government office in Wiesbaden, Germany...
Defined as entropy, the second law of thermodynamics proposes that energy is more easily dispersed than it is concentrated...
Tour this House in High Park by Ian MacDonald | Wallpaper (Image credit: Tom Arban) By Ellen Himelfarb published 10 February 2024 With House in High Park, it's clear why Ian MacDonald has become Toronto’s architect of record for a certain homeowner blessed – whether they recognise it or not – with a tricky location...
A peek behind the many masks of James Ensor in new Brussels show Art market Museums & heritage Exhibitions Books Podcasts Columns Technology Adventures with Van Gogh Search Search Exhibitions preview A peek behind the many masks of James Ensor in new Brussels show A new exhibition will explore the Belgian artist’s later works, including his little-known ballet, as part of Belgium’s year-long commemoration of the 75th anniversary of his death J...
A painting reminiscent of a certain “naive primitivism,” Untitled (the way in is the way out) is representative of McCarthy’s work...
Efectos de familia (Family Effects, 2007–9) is a series of 13 videos that dramatize an array of abusive events derived from Edgardo Aragón’s family’s history—specifically its involvement with organized crime...
In Un Hombre que Camina (A Man Walking) (2011-2014), the sense of rhythm and timing is overpowered by the colossal sense of timelessness of this peculiar place...
"A Land Imagined" and The Ghosts We Forget | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia Articles Photo courtesy of Akanga Film Asia & Philipp Aldrup Photography Photo courtesy of Akanga Film Asia & Philipp Aldrup Photography February 21, 2019 By Alfonse Chiu (1200 words, six-minute read) The three definitions of the word “ghost” from the Oxford dictionary are as follows: the first, “an apparition of a dead person which is believed to appear or become manifest to the living”; the second, “a slight trace or vestige of something”; and the third, “a faint secondary image caused by a fault in an optical system, duplicate signal transmission, etc.” In all three, presence is a suggestion of memory, amenable to corrections by means of a quick scrub of one’s spectacles...
davi de jesus do nascimento’s earthy paintings, from the series sorvedouro , recall his memories as an essentially organic matter...