avşar gürpınar
when pigs fly
2018
plasticity v2 . critical design studio
Information
An empty room. Automatons wander about, unaware of one another, making noise. Some are a robot, some a duck, some Pepe, some Caillou. One passes in front of us, saying: “My friends and I were awake all night…” (1) Another approaches from the opposite side, muttering: “So strong is the belief in the most fragile thing in life—I mean real life—that this belief is eventually destroyed.” (2)
Before they are broken, these automatic figures function as objects of artistic, ideological, and political indoctrination through the songs they sing, the sentences they form, the tales they tell, the prayers they read, and the questions they ask. Within this room, they become the heralds of various manifestos and artistic positions.
Under normal circumstances, political, artistic, and ideological discourses operating at different layers are torn/extracted from their specific circle, framework, and context and are reproduced at the level of everyday life objects.
These automatons cease to be monotonous objects of mere spectacle, transforming instead into argumentative objects that dream, assert, and defend claims. Yet, they lose none of their ‘toyness’ either. They can still be played with, switched on and off, spatially rearranged, and they can elicit effects and reactions.
Even though they serve an artistic purpose, they are not art objects; they are still objects of everyday life.
Instead of creating their own unique, aesthetic, and overly valuable work of art, the artist injects their technical, theoretical, and aesthetic knowledge into an already existing, passive, but modifiable and transformable technological object of everyday life, thus indoctrinating it.
Avşar Gürpınar
(1) Futurist Manifesto. (2) Surrealist Manifesto.
Exhibition Review:
A Profound Simplicity
"That Broken One Was Your Toy" is not an exhibition presented with overly aestheticised, empty works or exaggerated, descriptive depictions; Avşar Gürpınar leads us through a door where we are left free, leaving room for our thoughts and imagination.
By Çiğdem Zeytin 14 March 2020
An empty room. Automatons wander about, unaware of one another, making noise. Some are a robot, some a duck, some Pepe, some Caillou. One passes in front of us, saying: “My friends and I were awake all night…” Another approaches from the opposite side, muttering: “So strong is the belief in the most fragile thing in life—I mean real life—that this belief is eventually destroyed.”
These are the opening lines of the exhibition text defining "That Broken One Was Your Toy." The exhibition, spread across a single space reminiscent of a chamber theatre and structured around three core concepts, feels prepared to create a spiritual and intellectual deepening within the axis of the Futurist and Surrealist manifestos.
The quotes we encounter on the wall, taken from various thinkers and artists, essentially serve as brief statements encapsulating the exhibition's intellectual focus. When we unpack each statement, the world we arrive at transforms into propositions upon which pages of text could be written and discussions could be held for hours, perhaps days.
“Only Cannibalism unites us socially economically philosophically” (Cannibalist Manifesto, 1928, Oswald de Andrade.)
We are faced with an exhibition that debates numerous concepts, ranging from humanity’s primitive realities to art. We see that the artist’s fundamental aim is to create an open invitation for us to engage in this intellectual debate in a simple manner, devoid of descriptive elements.
In the middle of the exhibition space, we see everyday toys confined to a 2-metre playing field, wandering about and uttering sentences from various artistic and intellectual movements around the world. The toys move independently, expressing their inner thoughts with the sentences they articulate. Like people talking to themselves on the street, lost in their thoughts, they advance from one corner to the next, sometimes getting stuck at the barrier formed by the frame. The effect created by this room exhibition, entirely based on manifestos, is intriguing. It gives the feeling of being in a thought-box, detaching us from the spatial context within a vertical and horizontal cube.
In this thought-box, the manifestos, which sit at the core of the exhibition, could perhaps be coded as formulas to interpret every new era the world enters. Especially in recent times, those of us who have drifted away from our intellectual and spiritual side are trapped within the realities of a realist world due to the traumatic events we experience. Perhaps this is why we must pause and revisit manifestos—which can also be seen as enlightenment triggers—to distance ourselves from the mediocrity, clichés, and repetitions that merely pretend to ask questions and offer thoughts about humanity, our inner journey, our production, and our ways of being.
In saying this, I also include the hot topics of the day. If we personify the period we are in, we can say that the nature and spirit of the era are behaving in a destructive, courageous, and challenging way, perfectly aligned with the propositions of the manifestos.
For instance, in the Futurist Manifesto, Marinetti asserts the claim that "No work that is not aggressive, destructive, can be a masterpiece," and by stating, "We want to express in our poems the passion for danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness," he encourages danger and the courage, experimentation, and search for alternatives that stem from it.
The Surrealist Manifesto, which replaces a repetitive, rule-based perspective anchored in realism with imagination, invites us to break the mould by declaring, "It is not the fear of madness that compels us to lower the flag of imagination halfway."
From this perspective, we can state that "That Broken One Was Your Toy" is not an exhibition presented with overly aestheticised, empty works or exaggerated, descriptive depictions; Avşar Gürpınar leads us through a door where we are left free, leaving room for our thoughts and imagination.
As with the manifestos, Avşar Gürpınar demonstrates a courageous attitude in his first solo exhibition. In his initial encounter with the art audience, he offers a surprising simplicity that is far from clichés, unexpected, and arguably risky for a first solo show, yet one that presents a powerful intellectual and spiritual depth.
The exhibition is open until 22 March at Kıraathane İstanbul Literature House.