Emre Özakat

Synecdoche, Synecdoche, Synecdoche,

Studio Current, Amsterdam

2024

It was after a soft-core hookup ( no penetration, only hands and mouth as God intended) that we found ourselves lying in bed getting lost in the required post-coital conversation to show respect to each other. And the formula of questions that are already designed for us to speak, arrived.

Where from?
How long have you been in Amsterdam?
What do you do?

I told him that I am an artist and a writer. Finding myself in a moment which I am able to display my narcissism to an audience. I started talking about my current project on Medea which I was working on. He said he loved Medea. The conversation went on for another 15 minutes while we exchanged our ideas, until I realized that he was talking about the Tyler Perry movie franchise.

“You artists,” he told me before leaving my room. “Into funny stuff. aren’t you?”

The categorization of ‘you artists’ manifests itself as you navigate through the two rooms and observe the works of Tom, Emre, Killian, Nanna, and Hippolyte. The artists here show their work in relation to their friendship and what that network of acknowledgment feels like when one finds oneself in the cogwheels of institutional mannerism of putting on a show together. Ghostly images take you to desire to form a relation with the artists. You are in a very romantic setting (I made a joke here), and romance is best not explained, but experienced. Re narrativizing is a power we all behold, but the artists desire to take that feeling in a space in the shape of… (well, fill in the dots with whichever work you are seeing right now).

Some questions for the artists for the exhibition text:
Any strong references you feel need to be mentioned?
Where is the title coming from?
What was your process (change “process” to something that sounds way cooler)?
What are you going to wear to the opening?

I once told a friend that when I see a work, the first question that comes to my mind is; how does the artist look? I love hot artists. A little fling with an artist in their studios with messy floors always gives me a new perspective on their work. De-intellectualization is fashionable here! (Maybe take this part out, sounds a little cringe :(). We are mapped through a fictional network of gossip as we try to create safety nets for each other. Feeling left alone with what has been given to us, trying not to get manipulated, while at the same time the trickery of it sounds and looks rather sexy. (birds sounds are annoying me, maybe try to write something about that). In the inconsequential (learn low to pronounce inconsequential) relationality that brought us together (art school), we tried to make sense of these white walls (how original) to their practices and what my exhibition text looks like.
Many drinks, different landscapes, falling in and out of love and fucking somehow created this group of works that you seem to experience over a drink (will there be drinks, heard there is no budget). The act of telling can take many forms in the same landscape. Like Scheherazade, they keep retelling the stories of a fictional collectivity in haunted gestures. Eroticism is rather a sculptural tonality in the space. From painting, to images, to installation, every work takes on a very eerie mannerism in the space which has been given to them to work with, and given to us to see. This (so-called) romantic relation is the core of this exhibition.

“I believe this to be an authentically senseless chain of correspondences, but in the jingle-jangle morning of that summer it made as much sense as anything else did,” writes Joan Didion in “The White Album”, making us ask the same question again and again of the intentions of our desires and how to make sense of them. This act of questioning is rather simple but with good intentions. It is the jingle jangle of our friendship and the act of self-exhibiting (no curators, no institutions, just friends in and outside of these walls).

“Having a Coke with You is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona, partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better. happier St. Sebastian, partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yogurt…” Reads Frank O’Hara with a very strong gesturality of a poet. Cigarette in hand, his distanced “poet voice”.

It makes you wonder; who is “you”? That takes the form of many different faces, clothes, cities, lovers, families, landscapes. drinks..

And here lies the answer (partially in a very small but sensual manner) to that question.
Here is the “you” of many forms and shapes.

— Mehmet Suzgun