The Border Runs in The River, 2024, 25-piece installation, intervention with brush-ink and thinner on the photograph, plastic frame, 75x 180 cm, @daire sanat
The artist, who produces his works on the concept of border, sets out from a real experience as a continuation of his series in this project. With the opening of the borders in March 2020, the artist travelled to the Meriç river with refugees on his ‘journey of hope’ adventure. Drawing on her memories here, she started to analyse the state borders drawn by water. Throughout the Open Workshop programme, the artist explored the strategic importance of water as a commodity in international relations. His aim here was to explore the interaction of state borders with water basins. He also brought together a large number of landscape paintings by drawing images of these places. By emphasising the relationship between the natural beauty of water in landscape painting and the complexity of state politics, she aimed to move these drawings beyond individual landscape paintings and to characterise them as part of water and state politics.
In modern times, however, according to psychology – that defines the human being as an “individual”, the basic building block of society – and other researches, we see that individuals are opposed to killing and other acts of violence. But the individual within a military establishment, contrary to the opinion that they carry in their essence, will present a mental state of willingness to kill, and becomes part of a multitude of similar mind-sets where the general overshadows the
personal.
In this series, the works compiled from photographs that have been rendered anonymous through the internet and dispersed to various locations via the internet, are presented after being subjected to manipulation. These frames, documenting the everyday “human” conditions of soldiers, on their own or in groups, not in battle, and overall without a historical and pro-war discourse, remind us of a realm of existence far from the individual who has become mechanical by standing right next to violence, and closer to their “lost” essence.