- Venue
- Star and Shadow Cinema
- Location
- North East England
Established through a chance meeting in 2007 between Carole Luby and Genco Gülan on Facebook, Istanbul Newcastle Exchange (INX) facilitates a relationship between a group of performance artists from Newcastle and Istanbul. This year ten artists, five from Turkey and five from the UK, put on a two-day event at the Star and Shadow for a series of live art performances and round table discussions. The work challenged audiences to respond to diverse issues such as human rights abuses, sexism and the construction of our cities and societies. Other works were more introspective, examining the role of ritual and the self.
An exchange between Newcastle and Istanbul provides an opportunity for discussion and a way to explore the connections between the two regions despite imposed political divisions. Deniz Aygün’s piece, Miss Universe, shows a beauty pageant contestant wearing banners from dozens of different countries. With each banner she asks us to question, based on her physical appearance, could she be Miss America? Miss United Kingdom? Miss Brazil? In this way we begin to question our own stereotypes. Who could be Miss United Kingdom and who could not? What are the prerequisites for representing a country in this nationalistic competition of the face? Who does belong and who is excluded and on what grounds?
And what are the consequences of this process of inclusion and exclusion, that happens not just in the beauty contest but at every micro and macro level of society? In Needle Woman, Funda Karakus, reveals harrowing statistics from the war in Iraq, female genital cutting and other abuses of human rights, to a blind-folded audience in an atmosphere of unease and disorientation. She says, “Performance is a way to say something. It is real, it’s not acting.”
Carole Luby and Sally Madge’s S.C.U.M. treads a bloody line between reality and performance as they revisit Valerie Solanas’ SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) Manifesto to gory and comic effect. Underlying the theatrical element of the work is a need to reignite a passionate criticism of the sexism still prevalent in our society and the challenge to change it..
In contrast to looking at the divisions between people, Alper Akçay explores deep ritual and a connection to the Universal in LuwiLux 09, a sacred space in which to acknowledge our interconnection. His work develops out of an engagement with Central Anatolian whirling rituals, which have similarities with meditative practices in many cultures from North America to Pakistan. He evokes the spiritual, the magical and the carnivalesque using specially designed costumes embedded with LED lights and an engaging sound-scape of voice, nature sounds and trance music.
From the extraordinary to the everyday, Genco Gülan and CLAIRE both use durational performance to explore personal rituals. CLAIRE’s Perfect embodies a process of striving for control and balance without ever quite resting on the fulcrum. Her work provided a persistent rhythm to the event, the ends of her specially constructed seesaw repeatedly hitting the ground as she paced back and forth over the point of balance. In Gülan’s Genco Gülan wants to build a new castle in Newcastle the artist trims his hair, little by little and adds the off-cuts to an emblem of Newcastle. Tiny ritualistic actions repeated incessantly to embellish something larger, the symbol of a city.
The themes of deconstructing and recreating a city and balance are revisited in Insel Inal’s Construct a city by yourself. CLAIRE’s seesaw is dismantled and made into a swing onto which hundreds of porcelain casts of lego blocks are balanced. The audience is encouraged to use these to build structures and watch them smash to the ground from the swing’s unsteady surface. Tiny ritualistic actions repeated continually to create and destroy something larger, a symbol of city, its suburbs and slums.
David Foggo and Paul Grimmer also evoke a sense of ritual in their performances. Foggo uses his painting and decorating background to create Desktop. The piece notably leaves a mark in the space, a large inky circle painted onto the floor of the venue. It raises questions of how performance and personal rites can be recorded in ways that are continuous with their nature, rather than imposed by film and photography. How can the event be marked or recorded in a way that does not sacrifice the performative, temporal and site-specific nature of the work? Foggo’s work challenges this by leaving a large mark in the space. Can this tell future visitors about the work or does it become a new piece in its own right, entirely removed from the performance for anyone who visits after the festival is over?
Grimmer reverses the relationship between audience and performer in a theatrical context in Filler. A member of the audience finds her/himself on the stage, blinded by stage lights, with the artist in the audience insistently clapping. Grimmer found that the piece had a different emphasis when shown in Turkey, where the experience of sitting isolated on a chair with blinding lights glaring at you is evocative of interrogation and torture. Whereas on a stage in Newcastle the work speaks of the roles played out in the ceremony of theatre. In both instances, the work addresses issues of control and power within a constructed environment, but the context shifts dynamically according to who is experiencing the performance and where it takes place.
Many of the performers dispensed with conventional uses of language in order to cross linguistic and cultural barriers. In place of English or Turkish each developed a dialogue with the audience using their own vocabularies of gesture, applause, song or insistent activity. The audience responded with attentive engagement, participation and where appropriate, their own applause. This offers an interesting model for cultural exchange, where language can be a primary obstacle and often not overcome, hindering any further connection. Underlying the INX project is a fundamental desire to relate to each other and where that desire exists, art and performance can provide an alternative set of tools based on our common humanity and sense of playful ingenuity.
Political disturbances and personal rites connected the performances from Istanbul and Newcastle, perhaps drawing attention to our common needs to be seen and to observe ourselves. Performance and exchanges such as INX can provide an opportunity to negotiate preconceived notions of other cultures and of our own, in an environment where each can speak for themselves and choose their own means of re/presentation.
