Asli Çavusoglu, Pink as a Cabbage/Green as an Onion/Blue as an Orange
How have the social uprisings in Turkey during the last decade shaped the way we reimagine sites of everyday resistance? Can planting seeds constitute a political act? These questions mark the starting point of Pink as a Cabbage / Green as an Onion / Blue as an Orange , Asli Çavusoglu (Istanbul, 1982)’s first solo exhibition in France which stems from her residency at KADIST in the beginning of 2020. Following Gezi Park (Istanbul) protests in 2013, some people created urban guerilla gardens to reclaim neglected land, while others worked to preserve historical urban gardens facing the threat of urban redevelopment. Others established ecological farming initiatives in rural Turkey, advocating for sustainable and community-supported agriculture. This exhibition draws on more than a dozen of these initiatives, both new and old, which propose forms of resistance through kinship, solidarity, and collective dreams. It presents an installation with natural fabrics and dyes to introduce a mapping exercise about their stories. Çavusoglu often uses color as a storytelling device . For Red/Red (2015), she followed the story of an almost extinct pigment made of dried and ground Ararat cochineal, an endangered insect species native to the geography around the border between present day Turkey and Armenia, which remains closed due to political and territorial disputes. For The Place of Stone (2018), she investigated the story of lapis lazuli and introduced fragments of how this deep, celestial blue gemstone has been extracted and exported from Afghan mines for centuries. In Pink as a Cabbage / Green as an Onion / Blue as an Orange , Çavusoglu employs a similar artistic strategy as she dyes natural fabrics with fruits, vegetables, and plants cultivated by the farming initiatives she has been in touch with. Yet, rather than formulating the history of a particular color, here the artist thinks through color bringing together the various stories and models these farming initiatives have offered. The work takes the form of an installation with eighteen fabric rolls of different sizes, textures, patterns, and rhythmic surfaces with muted, earthy colors—each corresponding to a unique initiative. The installation favors a flexible structure that adapts to its two host sites, Paris and Istanbul and the display evokes the setting of bazaar-like stalls, forming a temporary gathering with provisional and deployable structures. A riff on a poem by Surrealist writer Paul Éluard, the last part of the exhibition title suggests that imagination is a critical part of future-building. In a time when the pandemic is making the unfolding crisis of agricultural production and distribution even more visible—with farmers destroying a year’s harvest of vegetables despite an increase in demand for food—, Çavusoglu’s work reminds us about the pathologies of the existing, industrial, and heavily marketized food systems. The exhibition positions small-scale farming initiatives not only as sites of everyday resistance, but also as value systems that will play a central role for future politics. Adapted from Özge Ersoy’s essay for the exhibition’s publication.