Can Altay & Jeremiah Day
Arcade, London, UK
An exhibition as a work-in-progress is unusual in a commercial gallery, though this is the impression left by Can Altay and Jeremiah Day’s show at young London space Arcade. Comprising a collection of photographs and scribblings, the show is an assemblage of ongoing thoughts and ideas that may change even over the course of its stay at the gallery. Newspaper clippings are pinned up in one corner, while a small television set placed on the floor shows a looped piece of film of a man’s hands manipulating a mussel out of its shell. A conversation in Turkish plays out from the speakers overhead. The overall effect is confusing and intriguing in equal measure.
The exhibition has come out of a shared residency that Altay and Day recently completed at Platform Garanti, the non-profit arts centre in Istanbul. The duo first met at the Cork Caucus in 2005, a meeting of more than 60 international artists and writers that took place as part of the city’s tenure as European Capital of Culture. The caucus explored the ways in which contemporary art may impact upon society and politics, themes that are pertinent to both Altay’s and Day’s individual practices, as well as their work at Arcade.
Here the artists present an investigation of the city of Istanbul, in part via its trade in stuffed mussels. A symbol of the city, a transcription of the Turkish conversation playing in the space reveals that the shellfish also has a political resonance. The fisherman complains of being filmed without permission and being misrepresented by the media. ‘But when people come, they don’t come with good intentions, they had secret camera, shooting me, I did not know, you see what I mean,’ he says. ‘He’s shooting me on a secret camera and all I say is true actually, but the way they show it, and there’s no worth left of me once I’m on the TV like that.’
The fisherman’s story blends with the other narratives hinted at in the exhibition. The newspaper clippings refer to fugitive vessels used to travel to the Greek islands as well as to the ‘Ergenekon’ case, an ongoing police probe that has seen hundreds of prominent citizens, including retired army generals, put on trial and accused of planning a coup. These political tales of contemporary Istanbul merge with Day and Altay’s own documentation, which comprises photographs taken of street scenes and shots of life on the waterfront alongside flow-charts of words that link the themes of the exhibition together. It is unclear what is true and what is fake, both in what is documented by the ‘real’ media – for, as the fisherman says, can it be trusted? – and what is presented by the artists.
On the opening night of the exhibition, Day added to these ideas and stories with a performance piece (pictured above), supposedly decided upon only days before. In it he crawled across the gallery space while talking of his and Altay’s experiences – both physical and mental – of living in the city and of the numerous ideas they had during the residency, some that were used and some not. At one stage, Day mentioned a discussion where they questioned how to show the stark variations in wealth and living conditions they witnessed and explained their difficulty with this. His return to these ideas in the performance reiterated the sense in which the exhibition remains an ongoing process, and a clear evocation of Istanbul remains elusive in this show. Instead the artists give us a series of fragmented ideas, an experience perhaps akin to flicking through stations on a radio and picking up currents of stories before moving on. Nothing is quite complete or certain and we are left to discover (or make up) the end of the narratives by ourselves.
Eliza Williams
Responses
Added by Keith Stern-Pirlot,
Jeremiah Day and Can Altay’s collaboration surprised those in attendance with a kind of performative psycho-geographical report by Jeremiah detailing the two artists’ drift through themselves, Istanbul, London and the cultural nexus joining them. Striking in its kindhearted honesty, it intervened into the normally pretense-laden space of commercial gallery openings with something akin to a collective catharsis.
For artists interested in social justice, something not often found is a sincere exploration of the contradictions within their “own” artistic practices. Often pointing the finger at something or someone else, many explicitly political artists are reluctant to give up the moral high ground and the oppositional framework that retains it. To allow complexity and its ambiguities into the picture would make them vulnerable. However, Jeremiah’s performance and the installation that set the stage for it, didn’t shy away from this—expressing a thoughtfulness and courage sorely needed in a world where the facts on the ground lie in stark contrast to the mass of denial that fogs them in.
A still popular slogan from the May ‘68 uprising in Paris called for us to “demand the impossible.” Over forty years later this attitude has become a hallmark of consumerism and a terrible obstacle to accomplishing anything meaningful. Contrary to this, Jeremiah Day and Can Altay’s exhibition suggested that in understanding and accepting where we are, right here, right now (rather than simply creating new fantasies to hang on the walls of misrepresentation), we are better able to make the choices that will bring about small but positive changes that are actually possible. And the more we build upon these possibilities, the closer the seemingly impossible becomes.
A few thoughts on Eliza Williams’ review:
There’s a difference between the mixing of traditional genres and “blurring the distinction between fact and fiction. ” I didn’t experience the latter with the exhibition or performance, even though it’s commonplace in this relentlessly manipulative culture.
Also, it was less like skipping through radio stations and making up one’s own story than like listening to a lot of different channels that someone else already filtered and retained those that where telling.
Finally, it’s been a long time since it was considered challenging for a commercial gallery to exhibit works in progress. What was daring for a commercial gallery, however, was Arcade’s willingness to allow itself to be problematized in a way that wasn’t cynical.
