Kelimeler Kifayetsiz

Vernissage: 28. August 2017, 6 PM
Exhbition: 28. August bis 30. September 2017
Open Thursday through Saturday 4 – 7 PM

Apartment Project is an organization devoted to collaborative artistic practice with a focus on global-local idea exchange. It was established in 1999 by Selda Asal in Istanbul. Since its inception, Apartment Project has served as a platform for collaboration and cooperation, bringing together artists from different backgrounds to create provocative and innovative work. In 2012, Apartment Project moved to Berlin-Neukölln and continues its works in Germany.

The Words are Insufficient

This project chases a woman who had neither a very long nor a very deep life. Nazifya Akarsu, died at the age of 35, and left 8 children behind. Her still-living 5 children don’t have much memory about her, and she couldn’t leave too much behind. The only information about her is as following: She is the daughter of a migrant family coming from Kosovo to Turkey in 1923. She had a life in poverty. She never learned Turkish. She never needed it. She passed all her life at home with her children. In regard of the socio-cultural structure in her neighbourhood, she was oppressed by her entourage and her husband. Along with this few information, Nazifya Akarsu is artist Ece Gökalp’s mother’s mother, and so her grandmother.

The project of “The Words are Insufficient” starts from a family tree which was found during an ordinary talk. This family tree signifies that, regarding Muslim culture in Turkey, kin transfers from one man to another. Therefore, women do not exist in the family tree. The continuity of kin is the one and only reality of a family. This encounter, that the artist had with her family, leads her to interrogate her own feminist identity. In this manner, the project turns into a symbol of a research for personal sense of feminism. A research on family tree based on this objective displays, in a micro level, the effects of gender roles both in family and in daily life. Hence, the artist presents a subjective perspective on the inevitable togetherness of the relationships between “individual” and “social”, “personal” and “political”, “private” and “public.” Chasing male domination in nucleus family is the exhibition of chasing gender roles.