Other Voices

The question of art is often related to making hidden structures visible and to put those processes at the forefront of thinking, which have been deprived from mainstream cultural representation. Oral history has been a trope to regain individual stories, which would otherwise be bereft of recognition. Personal fate in Diaspora conditions has been one of those issues, which calls for a deeper analysis to recollect and preserve the disparate voices telling about migration and identity processes. The latter has been a phenomenon to be observed over centuries, which makes individuals constantly surpass national conceptions of identity and belonging.

The exhibition Extracts from “Eclipsed Voices” curated by Basak Senova recently for Open Space in Vienna is an example of how to gather stories by individuals whose lives have been perceived outside the realm of what used to be dominated by western hegemonic thinking.

In the case of artist Erhan Muratoglu, the subject of his research is Nigar Güner, a 94 year-old woman who moved from Selvievo, Bulgaria, to Edirne, Turkey and then to Istanbul at the age of 15. Reminiscing of past events via photographs, Nigar, who passed away in 2009, euphemistically recalls the political and cultural changes, which Turkey has undergone in the course of the twentieth century. They form an account of subjective history making but at the same time refer to individual predicaments which mainstream history writing often neglects. What does it mean to grow up within different cultural and political geographies that constantly lead to questioning one’s own identity while coming of age? A video interview forms the basis for Muratoglu’s installation, while a large part of the installation consists of maps showing the travel route Nigar once took. A second map, which looks like an outlined geographical record at first glance, delivers a blurred geographical chart on closer examination. Hence, the artist refers to the blurred notion of memory, which the narrator in the video conveys. That everything seems melancholic at a certain age is partly due to the many experiences migrants live through, and the fact that with every move, life modalities drastically change.

The second installation in the exhibition takes up a similar phenomenon, yet in a different cultural context. The artist group SALA-MANCA dedicated their work to the recently deceased important Yiddish poet Avrom Sutzkever, who became 96 years old, but whose poems have only been read by a minority of Israeli people. A multi-media installation with sound coming from various headphones, visitors can listen to parts of his writings in Hebrew and English. The impossibility to understand most of the text transcends those parts of history, which are unfamiliar to the general audience at large. Dealing with the cultural control regarding the Jewish Diaspora in the 1950s, Sutzkever’s poems consist of personal memory similar to Nigar’s recollections, however on a more literal and refined manner.

What both installations have in common are moments of voicing the Other by forming counter strategies to hegemonic cultural narratives. Since it is never possible to understand the whole (of the story), this Other forms a necessary constituent of historical and political identity similar to the identity formation of the Self in Lacan’s mirror stage. The darkened and well-designed atmosphere of the exhibition underlines the notion of hidden moments within history, which refer to cultural and political phenomena that nevertheless have to be taken into account.