Untitled (briefly titled “A Monument for the Unfound”), tripod system, stroller, plaster, aluminium, flower arrangement. Multi-dimensional. 2021
A Support Structure: A monument for the Unfound
The screen showing the Remembrance’s Stench felt like it is larger than the room and heavier than it can carry. This feeling is also valid for Baha Görkem Yalım’s second work in the exhibition, A Monument for the Unfound, which is situated in the same room. Just like the life-size swan of the Threatened Swan, these two works create a sense of disorientation in the space. A mistake. A wrongly decorated room. Objects that do not fit in that cannot be specific or relevant to the site. Aliens.
A Monument for the Unfound is an installation, a ritual record that does not disclose its raison d’etre. Just like the Remembrance’s Stench, it does not provide a set of hints to the viewer, who is left alone to enjoy and dig into the conundrum. Suggesting that analyzing or “making sense of something is only one (not the best nor ideal) way of the establishing relationships” with an artwork, the opacity, untranslatability, and unintelligibility embodied in this form generates a strange potential for queering the space—and a moment of encounter with the work itself. This queer potential renders the encounter pregnant with possibilities.
A Monument for the Unfound is a floating monument with no feet on the ground, unoriginated and unfounded. In contrast to bulky guise, it is almost mobile, always ready to run. As a recurring concern in Görkem’s practice, the structure’s support manifests itself in this assembly of objects interconnected to each other. The components of the installation, the backdrop tripod, a baby carriage, a column, the flowers, the aluminium that wraps the flowers, and even the ceiling and the floor, abstracted from their utilities and representative qualities, start to hold and support each other to form a hard stable assemblage.
Untitled (briefly titled “A Monument for the Unfound”),installation detail. 2021.
Untitled (briefly titled “A Monument for the Unfound”),installation overview. 2021.
The curious system of support that enables each object to hold on to and carry each other can set a model for us to think about our communal structures of support. How do we support each other? What are the junctions that enable us to form an assembly? How do we hold together? How tightly do we hold? How straight? How would it be possible to hold it queerly? From another angle, these junctures are also the boundaries, the most fragile points, and our vulnerabilities’ contours. Therefore, just like abstraction, support as structure also carries an inherent form of violence. How do we press onto each other? How do we step onto others?
The backdrop stand tripod does not hold an illusional green curtain, and the baby carriage is not carrying a baby. The body, or many bodies, is not turned into an allegory but an abstracted form in a groundless column, a non-mysterious monolith, a broken obelisk, while forming a monument for nothing but itself, it's unfoundedness. For me, this is a monument for the new generations, young minds, the futures of the society on whom the queers are thought to be the bad influences only by their existences, as a common argument of conservatives worldwide. It is a monument to an “abstract sex,” “unproductive futurism,” and a block squeezing “the fascism of the baby’s face.”
Remember how the Turkish government had been using the fascism of the baby’s face in the last year: local education leaders forbade children to draw rainbows, arguing that it was a ploy to turn children gay. Two series in Netflix Turkey with two gay supporting characters in their scripts were censored or canceled. A textile giant in Turkey banned the use of rainbows, unicorns, and other symbols in its clothing because “themes that can create an LGBT perception must be avoided.” Turkey’s Trade Ministry mandated that any LGBT+ pride and rainbow-themed merchandise can only be sold to consumers over the age of 18, on the grounds that rainbow pride products could have negative effects on children’s growth.
Remember how the Turkish government had been using the fascism of the baby’s face in the last year: local education leaders forbade children to draw rainbows, arguing that it was a ploy to turn children gay. Two series in Netflix Turkey with two gay supporting characters in their scripts were censored or canceled. A textile giant in Turkey banned the use of rainbows, unicorns, and other symbols in its clothing because “themes that can create an LGBT perception must be avoided.” Turkey’s Trade Ministry mandated that any LGBT+ pride and rainbow-themed merchandise can only be sold to consumers over the age of 18, on the grounds that rainbow pride products could have negative effects on children’s growth.
Text by Alper Turan
Untitled (briefly titled “A Monument for the Unfound”),installation detail. 2021.