I knew it from the moment I left the house. I knew that, because of a few misplaced millimeters between my foot and my shoe, they would not get along well today—that indeed things would come to this point. But even knowing this, I made no changes, and I have no regrets. I would do it all over again.

As I took the final steps of my return home over the paving stones, the only thing I could think of was the view awaiting me after I would remove my sock. I did not check it even once throughout the day. I wanted to save the grand reveal for the very end. In any case I had no other choice either, I wandered from one place to another, strolling through the streets all day.

Monoton Otonom offers a fragment from Elif Yalım’s world—one where cables, despite having once carried vital information, are rendered obsolete and cast aside by relentless technological progress; scraps of fabric that have consented to detach from their whole in pursuit of becoming a beautiful dress; and objects that, if we were to play a game of guessing, would take the viewer to places both familiar and unknown, are all woven together.

Within the human-device relationship of the hyper-communication age, the meaning inherent to an object or a concept continuously shifts or blurs toward disappearance. As the routes information travels across multiply and as its methods grow increasingly complex, what remains of content and form becomes a void that can only affirm its own existence by itself. The sculptures in the exhibition may be read as negations, or rather as humorous embodiments of an inability, arising from the very failure to keep the grand promises made in the name of contemporary communication networks. What separates these bodies from their placesof origin is that they offer no promise for a contribution to the chain. They stand there as new images emerging in the void.

Capitalist society, concerned with the dimension in which objects become commodified and thus fetishized, exerts a similar effect upon bodies. Social units of measurement circulating by means of either possessing something or not, have seeped into flirting, friendship, love, dialogue — essentially into relational practices where we appear on stage with sincere emotions. In this context, emerging from a personal anecdote, Flörtyen Car mocks the perception of value produced by a system that exploits desire and renders it perpetually unfulfillable.

A parking bollard hand-modified by a shopkeeper; a plastic bag which, after carrying different things to and fro different addresses, finds itself dismissed from duty; and objects sweeping along in the city’s flow because they no longer know where to go, are scattered across the streets as breakwaters against monotonous lives. The photographs in Random Forms bring with them the knowledge that everything appearing to have randomly fallen before us that day, at that hour, in that wind—simply because we happened to pass by—may not be accidental at all. Encountered in public space, these forms remind us that the art object can exist in an uncalculated ordinariness, or in a state of simplicity focused around function. They encourage idle, wandering walks away from the linear journeys imposed by contemporary infrastructures designed to move us from point A to point B as quickly as possible.

Looking at the textures of everyday life through this lens of randomness, Elif finds the inevitable wounds of rigidified postmodernity on these same streets. It seems to me that this proposes a fundamental spiritual premise: that we can find manifestations of what we seek, wherever we choose to look for it. The series Sensitive Things reads the fact that the asphalt, although currently withstanding thousands of vehicles each day without question was once open to impact, together with the mark left on skin by the shoe worn despite knowing that it will hurt. I stand in the warmth of perceiving a raw egg pierced by a screw, asphalt stamped by a paving stone before it was dried, and various other deformations as reflections of my own soft tissues. This place, I like.

Framed by all these landscapes, we drift together within a strange reality whose boundaries seem to extend into our personal lives—so much so that it makes my head spin. More growth, more acceleration, more communication, more knowledge, more speed, faster, bigger, and bigger. Industrial revolution > speed > motor > messenger > the bird is dead. “After all, pizzas should stay warm; they should reach the customer on time; the ratings shouldn’t drop; the bosses shouldn’t grow angry”, Elif writes. The bird is no longer alive. Lying in the middle or at the edge of the highway, she is no longer among us for reasons only we may truly know. Do we not owe the bird an explanation? 

— Zeynep Yılmaz