ESRA ERSEN
The two main characteristics of Esra Ersen's works-site-specitificity and a biting political edge-were already grounded in her earlier works. The projects she produced before starting a series of residence programmers in various European cities exhibited even a sort of anger that was conditioned by the heavy and violent political agenda of Turkey in the mid-nineties. A critique of repressive practices and discourses, operated not only through the state mechanisms but also through the conformist retreat of the general population from the public space, was translated into Ersen's works as a distance she retained between herself and the audience-a distance meant to hurt. What had been repressed, concealed or rendered invisible by a suffocating consensus was brought onto the surface. Materials with apparent political and gender connotations (shoe-laces in the form of execution ropes, a sliced off cook crest, a series of fresh umbilical chords, fingerprints of policemen revealed by themselves and a so forth) forced the audience to face traumas they had removed into the depths of their subconsciousness. The piercing and rebuking quality of those works was intensified by the staunch rejection Ersen's part to relate her artistic persona with the audience, visually and rhetorically.
The cultural, artistic, and personal experience Ersen gained during her stay in Europe seems to have had a dramatic impact on her works. Having retained the two dynamics of site-specifity and political criticality, she started to focus on the communicative dimension surfacing during the process of art production, on the interaction with the figures of her works and the audience-extending the pursuit of specificity from sites to general contexts. This dimension, in return, led her to study the cultural differences between her cultural of origin and the ones in which she was working and exhibiting. Parallel to this, the choice of medium in her works shifted from installations designed to produce a first-hand, unsettling atmosphere towards docu-narrations pursuing a dramatic course. Undoing the conventions of cultural stereotyping, reversing and de-familiarizing the clichés and ascribed qualities about the West and its Others, resisting the representational modes of expression that has been expected from her by the inviting institutions, and pushing her thematics deliberately towards banality or self-eroticization were the strategies Ersen employed in a playful, and sometimes lightly provocative manner during this period.
The recent projects of Ersen's have been based on some marginalities within various contexts. Glue sniffing, homeless boys on the streets of Istanbul; the immigrants in Sweden who have to take a difficult programme of language to receive a residence permit; the third generation of the Gastarbeiter population in Germany who now dare to express their claim to being a constitutive part of the nation-rebuilding; young men coming from Africa isolated in their daily life in a supposedly racism-free Turkey; or prisoners jammed into an old Austrian jail… Defying the comfort of contrived gestures for empathy, Ersen problematises her own authority on the plots of her video works in which the structures of narration are being slowly taken up by the interviewed people, in which they elaborate their own critiques, dreams, wishes, minor utopias in unexpected ways.
(Erden Kosova)
