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WOJTEK DOROSZUK/ RASPBERRY
24.4.2008-23.5.2008 |
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2008-04-24 |
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OTVORENIE/OPENING
24.4.2008, 19:00 |
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Birkaç Yer / Some Places
video, 22’30”, DVD pal 16:9; colour, sound; Ankara 2007 “I’ve met Toprak in Ankara. One night he came to a studio together with my friend Özlem and some other guys. “They are extremely brave: they are transes, fags, Kurds, leftists – all what Turkey hates. They are heroes.“ – this is how founders of Turkish LGBT movement were introduced to me. I’ve heard legends of them in Istanbul. Part of them have to stay at hiding after two-year time in famous Ulucanlar prison so as not to do next two years – officially for evading military service. They can lock you up endlessly like that. Toprak also did his time in Ulucanlar. Although he had not gone under surgery yet, they decided he is not a man and he is no longer a woman and they kept him all the time in separate cell. He calls himself Papa Gender. I asked him to show me Ankara, if he would like to be my guide. I would pay for hanging around a couple of hours by taxi and he would show me the most important places in his transgender life, drawing a map of traumas and moments of his happiness. It was a day of his 31st birthday...” 1 “Talking in Turkish to his girlfriend in company with understanding nothing Polish, [Toprak] resembles characters of earlier Doroszuk’s movie , „Lunch [1]”, where group of some people is talking in different languages keeping up appearances of mutual communication, seating together at the table. Doroszuk is recording vibrating city from the window of running taxi. He will find out whole story later, after translating a soundtrack. The inside of the car resembles a bathyscaphe in which accidental and strange people survived horrible catastrophe (...)” 2 1 Author’s comment to the exhibition “Birkaç Yer”; curator: Marcin Krasny, Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Okna Gallery, Warszawa, XII 2007. 2 Marcin Krasny, the excerpt from the exhiition brochure. Picnic video, 4’27”, DVD pal 4:3; colour, sound; Istanbul 2005 Picnic is one of some short video etudes which form the cycle of works devoted to intercultural communication issue, functions and competences of universal language, possibility or impossibility of operating within its borders. Eight persons of different nationalities (Danish, German, Pakistani, Spanish, Turkish and Polish), speaking English in everyday contacts, who coincidently had met together in Istanbul, took a part in arranged picnic. “The video “Picnic” shows a group of foreigners having a meal in the open-air. In an unreal atmosphere, they are having a studied, “spontaneous” conversation in Polish, a language they do not speak. The pretence and absurdity of the picture is reinforced by the romantic music, the rhythm of the slow-moving scenes and the digital processing of the footage. The oniric projection resembles the atmosphere of surrealist films, and reference to the traditional representation of feasting leads us to the belief that we witness a perfect communion between the people we watch.” 1 “Watching [“Picnic”] you can also fix your attention on a body language, to verify an authenticity of their opinions, their thoughts. I’d like to refer to Heidegger’s ‘idle talk’, chatting without any profound sense. Maybe our meetings like this one are doomed to be conventional and superficial? And we don’t notice it till watching this film. On the other hand there are some theories in XX c. philosophy of language saying that the most significant reason for which our meetings and talks take place is not an exchange of information but simply feeling good together.” 2 1 Ewa Ma³gorzata Tatar, Dominik Kury³ek, Viewer traps, [in:] the catalogue of 8th Eugeniusz Geppert Competition and 7th Exhibition of Young Painting, Centres for Contemporary Art BWA, Wroc³aw 2007. 2 Magdalena Biñczycka, Wojtek Doroszuk. Between the comprehensible and the untranslatable, Bunkier Sztuki, www.teksty.bunkier.pl [15.03.2006] Picnic (the movie set) |
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