Ripping up the Underbelly and Looking at the Folds of a Boundless Skin

NOTES
1-  I met İz at the queer tango workshop during the Istanbul Pride Week in 2011, when I felt completely free for the first time in my life. This tango interpretation, which is performed by mixing the roles that are genderly-distributed in classical tango, by constantly changing partners and roles. We performed as a group of 10 to 12 people during the parade. I have no memory of dancing queer tango with İz, but she was the first person I had met whose profession was “artist.” Since then we have changed many roles and collaborated on many levels.

2-  I asked “Why don’t you do a little more of what you are already doing well?” referring to formal abstractions.

3- Vasıf Kortun and Erden Kosova, Ofsayt ama Gol, SALT/Garanti Kültür AŞ, 2014, p. 60, first published in Szene Türkei: Abseits, Aber Tor!, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2004

4- Be it İz’s personal voice or a fictional character who speaks, the letters include a great amount of insights on İz Öztat’s practice in general and individual artworks. From here on, I will be using this footnote space to repeat some lines from the letters to illustrate and back up my arguments.

5-  “The relief that comes from being overtaken by anything’ sounds like the definition of surrender to me.” from the work titled Would you miss me if I disappeared? (2023).

6-  “Today, I started with the knifend the needles; sharp ends and the desire to scratch the surfaces.” from the work titled Would you miss me if I disappeared? (2023).

7-  “Do you have any updates on the sperm waitlist?” from the work titled Would you miss me if I disappeared? (2023). 8 “We both know that there is no progress in longing / loss / mourning, that they are circular…” from the work titled Would you miss me if I disappeared? (2023).

8-Similarly, in the book titled Haz/Cızzz [Pleasure/Sizzle], YKY, 2020, that consists of months-long correspondences between İz and Bige Örer, İz provides insights into her artistic research in preparation of her exhibition titled Suspended (2019).

9- I found it important to keep gossip in Turkish here which can be literally translated as “(she) said, (she) put” giving a material presence to what’s being said, usually in a third person.

10- İz Öztat, “Daredevil”, m-est.org, January 2023

11- https://m-est.org/2023/01/11/daredevil/

12- Bige Örer and İz Öztat, Haz/Cızzz [Pleasure/Sizzle], YKY, 2020, p. 84. (my translation)

13- Didier Anzieu and Naomi Segal. The Skin-ego: A New Translation by Naomi Segal, Routledge, 2018.

14- From the work description for Boo Boo written by İz Öztat, 2022.

15- ibid.

16- Nurdan Gürbilek, Kör Ayna, Kayıp Şark: Edebiyat ve Endişe, Metis Yayıncılık, 2004, p.114.

17- Rebecca A. Reynolds, Freud after Bataille: Death, Dissolution and the ‘Oceanic’ Feeling, Diss. University of Essex, 2019.

18- İz Öztat, “Daredevil”, m-est.org, January 11, 2023, https://mest.org/2023/01/11/daredevil/.

19- “Deleuze gives us Foucault’s vivid illustration of this relation - the Renaissance madman, who, in being put to sea in a ship becomes a passenger, or ‘prisoner’ in the interior of the exterior – the fold of the sea.” Simon Sullivan, “The Definition: The Fold”, The Deleuze Dictionary, Edinburgh University Press, 2005, pp. 102-104. Also available online at https://www.simonosullivan.net/ articles/deleuze-dictionary.pdf.

20- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, A Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe (Akademie-Ausgabe), Akademie Verlag, 1923, as cited in Mogens Lœrke, “Four Things Deleuze Learned from Leibniz.” Deleuze and the Fold: A Critical Reader, 2010, pp. 25-45.

21- “Being surrounded by your folds”; “…daring to take hold of the knives hiding in our folds, digging into our I’s, falling deep…”; “I am slowly detailing the conceptual bearings of the next body of work around (auto)biography / fiction, navigation, folds, sculpture, desire, rage.”; “I think about the relationship between surface and volume, the uncertainty of what is inside and outside, folds becoming holes, the movement from inflection to inclusion…” from the work titled Would you miss me if I disappeared? (2023).

22- From e-mail correspondence and from the work titled Would you miss me if I disappeared? (2023).

23- İz Öztat, “Daredevil”, m-est.org, January 11, 2023, https://mest.org/2023/01/11/daredevil/.

24- Maria Walsh, Art and Psychoanalysis, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2012, p. 39.

25- İz Öztat, “Daredevil”, m-est.org, January 11, 2023, https://m-est.org/2023/01/11/daredevil/.

26- ibid.

27- Bige Örer and İz Öztat, Haz/Cızzz [Pleasure/Sizzle], YKY, 2020, p. 50. (my translation)

28- “(cf. Silverman’s discussion of Theodor Reik’s Moloch fantasy in Silverman 1992, 208f.)”, Volker Woltersdorff, “Masochistic Self-shattering Between Destructiveness and Productivity”, Destruction in the Performative, Brill, 2012, p. 134.

29- Leo Bersani, The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art, Columbia University Press, 1986.


30- Tim Dean, “Sex and the Aesthetics of Existence”, PMLA, vol. 125, no. 2, 2010, pp. 387–392.

Ripping up the Underbelly and Looking at the Folds of a Boundless Skin

                                                                                            A: What are you doing?                                                                                                     İ: I am doing art[1]

I. putting a body out there

Searching for linearity and coherence in her practice, falling into the professional deformation of a lazy curator who wants to have a one-liner to grasp and some canons to think with, one day, I questioned İz’s material and formal divarications.[2] At that time, she was working on her homage text to Füsun Onur and she came to where we met from Eminönü with bags full of blue tulle to figure out Onur’s usage of them - she was to experiment with the material, to bodily communicate with Onur, to become her first and then the tulle itself. İz responded to me by pointing out the immense varieties in Füsun Onur’s oeuvre which was, with overt misogyny, compared to “a dowry chest opening and closing.” [3]

Now in the Underbelly exhibition, İz Öztat, opens and closes her own dowry chest. With a manifold of materials from tulle and intestine to brass and words on the wall; the exhibition folds, unfolds, and refolds a body that resists a fixed narrative short-cut compartmentalization, a shallow coherence. İz creates a self-referential universe claiming and celebrating the third dimensions that are configured within self-mythologies, not in a self-indulgent way but while constantly problematizing the myths of selves. Unlike her previous exhibitions stating primarily political proposals quoting from private practices, Underbelly comes different. This time, not the individual artworks, but the very act of putting her work out there, a work growing out of the visceral (auto)biography is a political statement.




Despite her resistance to creating a spatial narrative, there’s a palpable tension in İz’s Underbelly, an attempt to hold the space with a narrative. The convoluted, sporadically broken red latitude is folded in the space and circulates the room as a blood river, a damaged vein, a loaded faultline. This is Danube as Biography: Reduced and Simplified (2023); taken, reduced and enlarged from a map view of the river found in Zişan’s archive, bringing her exile route back to Istanbul. Zişan, who was forced to leave Istanbul in 1915 and fled to Adakale, then Berlin, remained as an anonymous practitioner until her name has been pronounced by İz as an artist to be inserted into the avant-garde art canons. İz has been collaborating with her beyond times and spaces in the same materiality. Zişan, who loses herself in others and performs others in her own body, has been accommodated in İz’s skin in the last thirteen years, who, respectively, surrenders herself easily to being surrounded. Folds of each other, İz and Zişan, both appear to each other as historical figures, ghosts, and alter egos. Zişan gives İz the possibility to mourn and confront the past, İz gives Zişan a body to inhabit, to materialize an embodiment, and to test its limits. Abstraction of each other, they use and hold one another when they need a public face, when something mahrem, repressed or denied needs to be articulated out loud.

Put intrusively in proximity to Zişan’s route and going as far as this red line, is the fragmented and scattered text piece, Would you miss me if I disappeared? (2023) applied on the wall with pencil. Written in the firstperson singular, following a chronological line between 2018 and 2022, the text starts like diary entries, then comes a crescendo of tone and texture of love letters sent from one source addressed to an unrevealed or unresponsive lover. These paperless letters, on the one hand, talk about almost each and every work in the exhibition produced in the last four years, put them in personal contexts, and detail their formations; [4] on the other hand, they expose rises, flies, and falls of a queer love with concrete memories, images, obstacles. Sucked into the position of a voyeur, we read about the visa issues that put an ocean in between the narrator and her lover, [5]  the narrator’s psychoanalysis séances, [6] her consideration and ultimate refusal to be a mother, [7] while we circle in the exhibition space [8] in the vortex of the intimate narrative. Against the blessings of legibility, this text piece complicates the possibility of any clearcut comprehension of the work itself and the motivation behind its making. We are left wondering about the personal background of an already personallyperformative artwork. Is this İz that we are reading? Is this her artistic statement in the form of a monologue? Is there love at work? Love, as a concept, catalyst, and narrative is a great abstraction and opium, stands for every other thing that needs to be masked to be high and out in public. Is İz using this mask of love to convey her work through the same vein where the love flows? İz always generously shares textual accompaniments to her material work in various forms of zines, letters, and books.[9] This time in the form of an artwork, Would you miss me if I disappeared? gives a solid account and testimony to artworks in the exhibition only to render them ambiguous while playing in the folds of fact and fiction, public and intimate, artwork and its making. In a state of suspension, we are left with the dedikodu [10] material that wraps the whole exhibition with the larger questions on the artwork, its visceral process, and its public reception.

Sharing the same wall zone but this time only a small corner and far from the red line and almost invisible love marks, İz exhibits a series of abstract works at the top end of the wall cornering the ceiling. Printed digitally, surrounded by red lino-printed frames, these are distilled images of swallows who intruded into İz’s temporary studio in Berlin [11] upon her arrival in the city as a fresh self-exile. Just like Zişan and the narrator of the letters, İz immigrated to Berlin from Istanbul, and the swallows that came in groups for some nights in a row and circled in her studio transiently became for İz some symbol of free movement and an unburdened state - she titled the abstracted images of moving forms of swallows as Apparitions.

İz Öztat,  Apparitions , 2022 Digital and linoleum print, Set of 20, 29,5 x 21 cm, each

From the forms of reduction (reduced biography) to the disappearance (Would you miss me if I disappeared?) and to an apparition (swallows abstracted to become apparitions), these three massless wall pieces enclosing the exhibition exemplify the usual triangular operations of İz; blurry-edged workings of a lived experience, a fictional alternative, and their epiphanies in art. One cannot say which one is what. The simplified biography in the form of a line and the letters following a lifespan of love, black and white images of swallows produced swiftly all suggest timelines in different life cycles. And all those temporal indicators, with their material ephemeralities (temporary wall paint, wall text, and photocopied images) and two-dimensionalities, create a compare and contrast with three-dimensional objects scattered in the exhibition space. İz, very much intentionally, claims the third dimension in her practice over the two. She wants to be a ghost but still, she wants to have a material body. In one letter to Bige Örer, she speaks about her realization of how her works shrank into two dimensions as escalating violence on the body made it impossible to have a presence in the public sphere.[12] This led her to run against the grain and reclaim the volume and the depths as a queer woman and artist in Turkey. Maybe that’s why, the temporary and flat pieces on the wall do not feel like they exist for themselves, on the contrary, they serve the exhibition as narrative scaffolding, with their very temporariness and inherent playfulness, dictating the context(s). Once the gallery walls are painted back, what will happen to the other artworks, the objects with volume and depth? Will an object, which is a product of lived experience, fictional restoration, and artistic research, survive once these narratives collapse? If the artworks are parts of the artist’s body, will they continue living when the body is mutilated? 

Defining public space and its protocols through her exhibitions is a recurring mode for İz. One may always argue if an exhibition in an exhibition space is a public realm, and if so, how is the public in space different from the one on the street; but putting a statement in form out there and taking up space is always a political act. İz builds up artistic presentations that are projecting her microsocieties (for example, in collaborative works, contracts between all parties involved are exhibited alongside the “work”), using models of intimate interpersonal practices (for example, in her Suspended (2019) exhibition, she proposed consensually negotiating the loss of agency in society with masochist subjugation to a master), using the exhibition platform in an exhibitionist way (for example, she creates objects of fetishes, she sets-up scenes of confession, she proclaims and announces certain taboos). In Suspended, İz exhibited within an allegory only acts and objects of BDSM practice as the political proposal, by leaving her personal visceral reference out, somehow obscuring that BDSM’s political stance actually originated from its intimate transgression. Now in her Underbelly display, she is exhibiting the visceral details of a queer romance while investigating the political promises and potentials of constructing this intimate story (independent of fact or fiction condition) under the gaze of a public audience. In the exhibition, there are moments of dance and crash of public and intimate.


İz Öztat, Longing (From the Investigations into the Etiology of a Form series),  2021. Brass, ceramics, 2 pieces, 170 x 65 x 65 cm, each

The loving and longing objects made out of caring and soft materials coming from the haptic process are interrogated on cold psychoanalytic sofas if not behind a confession screen and confronted with the galvanized and

II. folding, unfolding, and scattering

An image is calling me when I try to imagine İz doing art in which she is sitting on a vast, infinite skin. She tests her skin, she experiences everything haptically, communicates with everything through her skin, puts everything in her envelope, and cuts it too while scratching its surface. Skin, for Anzieu, is a psychic envelope, where the ego is formed, the body’s largest sensory organ, the body’s border, limiting membrane which is always in interaction with the world. The first boundary an infant has to come to terms with is to understand where the self is being contained and separated from the other.[13] İz’s skin is where she internalizes things, she receives and filters stimuli, deciphers, and records words, things, and bodies, and eventually externalizes them by piercing them out of her surface. When I imagine her making art, I see her folding the boundless skin that she has made into a flat surface with her hands, flattening all the hills, bringing all the hierarchies to one level, turning everything into the skin, and every now and then cutting it here and there. She piles the skin on the ground and spreads it like dough. She does not wrap it like a ball of cloth but folds it one by one, and folds her own skin. Each layer creates another topography, each overlapping zone creates a new line of thinking. Folding - as an associative image of an act - helps me to trace the steps of İz’s operation to how a manifold of percepts, affects and concepts come together, how different temporalities crash, how her work is always a surface carrying and projecting long lineages and topographies in different dimensions, how the repressed returns, how skin transmits information and how it dissolves and drips.

İz unfolds her parchment and goes through previous chapters, and lives of early works: an image from her past video can haunt a new solo, or she can tell the background or flipside of an already told story. Underbelly, likewise, is a fold of Boo Boo, a body of work that seeks to imagine the love affair between Zişan and Vita Sackville-West, who meet in Istanbul, in 1913. Zişan works at the photography studio where they spend time, imagining each other in the representations they produce, getting to know each other’s desires, and documenting their love. [14] İz, for the first time, appearing as Zişan, and Ra, in disguise of Vita, in this staged story, “constructed their own selves in relation to each other in the experience of love, which they built as a field of research.”[15] While this project was many things at once, it was important to see how İz was practicing, rehearsing, or playing and ultimately exhibiting the ecstatic experiences where she plunged herself. Letting her body be bondaged, possessed in Suspended, and practicing love in Boo Boo were the aspirations to lose herself in something larger. Much larger.

Embodying the very act of folding the vastness of a skin-like surface, İz forms her own Oceanic Feeling (2022) with a bulk of blue tulle inherited from Füsun Onur and trapped by a fishnet. Very heartbreakingly. As a psychoanalytical concept, in Nurdan Gürbilek’s definition, oceanic feeling is “a dream of completeness that can be associated with (the mother, or any figure who leaves after evoking a sense of eternity) one’s first narcissistic experience.”[16] For Freud, this aspiration to return is called the death drive and also induces a primordial desire to go back to an inorganic state where there are no boundaries between self and anything else.[17] An oceanic skin. Continuity. A continuous body. Masterpiece and autoportrait of İz (she said so) embodying everything İz expects from a sculpture: a form that needs no outer structure, can’t be fixed and can’t hold themselves,[18] whose flesh is porous, whose volume is not intimidating, and the gesture it resonates is soft. In the realization of its impossibility, İz cuts the ocean, separates herself from it, folds her own share, and asserts its volume.

İz Öztat, Folds of Her Absence,  2022. Ceramics, brass cleat,  170 x 65 x 65 cm


For Deleuze, the fold is a conceptual force that blurs the pushes and pulls of subjectivity, such as interiority and exteriority, appearance and essence, and surface and depth. For him, fold announces that the inside is nothing more than a fold of the outside, and subjectivization, just like any topology, is created by folding inner and outer spaces onto each other. Deleuze borrows the fold from the readings of Leibniz and the baroque. For Leibniz, plurality happens only “when bodies are understood to be folded rather than  divided.”[20] Subject envelops the world and it envelops the subject, we fold in the world while the world folds into us. The whole world, one continuous body, is fluid; but folded in different ways, without any loss of continuity. Fold is already a study concept[21] for İz in her recent body of works, some of them are presented in Underbelly. For İz, fold opens terrains to reckon on the relationship between surface and volume, the uncertainty of what is inside and outside; folds have the potential to become holes and have the curved movement from inflection to inclusion.[22] Folds also organize the forms for her queer desire that are sometimes haunting her, sometimes she is running after.

Dead Reckoning to Her Folds is the title for İz’s new chapter researching queer desire through sculptural forms. In Berlin, following Etel Adnan and Audre Lorde, whose love for women was articulated via encounters with sculpted female forms, İz “flounders in the city, searching for three-dimensional representations of the female body that will reveal (her) own story of queer desire, longing, and exile.”[23] The founder of art history, whose queer sexuality was recognized by his contemporaries and potentially led to his being murdered in the 18th century, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, after studying anatomy, spent years observing, desiring, and depicting Greek sculpture with blatant homoeroticism, which asserted for the first time male nude as an object of desire for again a (male) gaze. His desire for the male body transformed his writings into libidinal and somaesthetic studies; his libidinal energy transformed the whole art-making and its historicization. İz is not as lucky as Winckelmann nor Etel Adnan and Audre Lorde in finding a sculpture she can project her desire onto, this’s how she made her own sculptures that are respectively her libidinal and somaesthetic studies. The tiniest fold in the exhibition is Folds of Her Absence, a pinch of a surface taken as a souvenir, a piece of skin ripped out of a lover, a gestural archive of someone lost. Or İz’s humble response to grandiose public sculptures of the men she has to expose herself in her quest for her own muse. No meat, no flesh, no presence, just folds of skin.

İz makes sculptures that she desires - almost never in human resemblance - but more like fetish objects that are removed from the phallic economy and not in search of a fixed object to be replaced and more as a displacement of the sexual object from one to another “being caught up in a metonymic chain of equivalences.”[24] Skins are her fetish objects, for example.[25]


İz Öztat, Conductor (After Zişan) (From the Posthumous Production series), 2014 Copper, wool, sponge, bamboo, dried intestine casing, 160 x 60 x 60 cm


Skin is a recurring material for İz, she not only uses her own skin to process things, but she also uses parchment, intestine casing, wool, and Underbelly, a proposal of selfdisembowelment itself, is her first display of the three animal materials together. In her text, Daredevil, she asks, “Intestine casing, then parchment, now wool; is it always the same animal that I am using and abusing? Am I that animal?”[26] Undeniably, BDSM practices informed İz’s aesthetics, especially masochism corresponding to her desire to be punished, and she reproduces tools to be used to punish her, knives to scratch the surface of her own skin. The first object she produced for the Suspended exhibition, Triangular Knife (2018) epitomizes the formal motivation of her tools for pain and pleasure, it is a form that requires you to cut yourself as you cut out.[27]

I don’t know if there is any art that can come into existence without any pain, but İz pries the pain loose; she opens new wounds so that she can look into them, at the form of the cut, the trace of blood pouring out of a wound, the crust’s shadow or, its materiality. Speaking the language of art, practice is often used interchangeably with the (body of) work; in a way that an object becomes its own making, thus whatever the practice, so to say the way of doing things, solidifies in the thing itself. In her body (of) work, İz practices and reworks the pain. She calls a ghost to confront the genocide in her body, she lets herself be rendered with no agency, she reenacts the political domination on her body; she dives into thousand pages long love letters to appropriate the voice of a broken heart, she uses needles to keep things together but also to pierce her own skin while doing it. In its most simplistic understanding, an organized and negotiated “escape from self”, masochistic fantasies consist of “becoming someone else or un-becoming someone.”[28] Self-shattering releases the tension of the disciplinary regulations. For Bersani, masochistic self-shattering has a destructive impact on the ego, and the subject “momentarily plunges” into powerlessness with “ecstatic suffering” as constitutive of sexual pleasure in which the self is momentarily demolished.[29] Tracing the ways in which aesthetic experience can be “a perpetuation and replicative elaboration” of self-shattering, Bersani looks at decomposition of forms and antinarrative impulses that make formal intelligibility and coherence impossible.[30] Along the same lines, İz’s self-scattering through her works share the same motivation of decomposing her selves, fragmenting them, rendering them almost impossible to grasp; processing every piece through her visceral and boundless skin and redistributing her sensible, a piece of her body.
  
She asks, “Is it possible to cope with guilt by experiencing the desire to be punished, and to externalize the pain by feeling it in the body when you obey voluntarily?”[31] Sometimes together with Zişan, and sometimes with other collaborators, İz’s ritualistic display of selfscattering is also a mourning practice: “Could it be that I want to be punished to ease the pain of events that I witnessed and could not mourn? Do I seek pleasure by externalizing pain with punishment, by desiring to mourn?”[32] While she is searching for ways to experience her work, giving it a third dimension, a body, a depth - she is simultaneously mutilating herself to pay her debt, the debt of surviving, the debt of not being imprisoned, not being massacred, the debt of being an artist and making art.[33]