Intensifications of Fiction-Memory in Burcu Gökçek's Prologue series

Necmi Sönmez

Burcu Gökçek, who has been producing fluidly delineated series using video, performance, collage, and painting techniques since the 2000s, has developed a closed discourse in her works. Whether abstract, semi-figurative, or conceptual, Burcu's research focuses on individuals seeking a specific subject position under today's political, economic, social, and psychological conditions. The multi-layered expression she creates by "in-pressing" particular concepts in her solo exhibition Prologue at Ferda Art Platform has a striking intensity as the artist presents the coordinates of the world of feeling with a tightly structured periphery. This exhibition, which consists of compositions made with acrylic on wooden panels, shows the decisive points by an artist who has followed the results of her experiments down to the smallest capillaries, knows very well what she does not want to do, and seeks a subject position of her own by weighing every step she takes. Instead of framing a specific story from beginning to end, Burcu creates a narrative that offers viewers an exploration of a different world, based on their own experiences and observations, with a system of renewal that makes the audience feel specific themes.

The Individual World

Prologue has a unity formed by the integration of two different series. The Round Compositions series, mainly produced between 2020-22, consists of panels in the form of Tondo. Constructed with vibrant colors and abstract, semi-figurative, and geometric compositional elements, the paintings in this series has two different focal points. The first focal point is the chaotic atmosphere created by intertwined organic forms. In these compositions, where sometimes fingers and sometimes light foci are seen, the viewer is made to think about the existence of "hidden figures" that never appear; this is the first focal point. It is evident that the presence of contrasting colors, often juxtaposed with the bravado peculiar to children, makes this series thought-provoking and, to put it simply, undefined. However, they also have a strange appeal, as they testify to a wild fusion of swirling organic forms. While looking at these pictures, the question of what is going on here resonates and is repeated in the viewer's mind. In the predominant graphics of these two-dimensional works produced during the pandemic, an atmosphere that invites the audience and makes them curious is dominant. The undefined and even strangeness of the image emerges in these panels, which were produced during the period when the day-to-day life processes were interrupted, suspended, and uncertainty swept across the globe. In these works, which are dominated by strange movements, bodily movement can also be observed. This recognition, of course, raises the questions of which body and which figure. How could we define the figure that makes their presence known only by "acts of touch" with fingertips? Who is this person? Are they the artist?

The answer to why Burcu needs these questions and other similar questions is concealed in the series of paintings called Interior, which form the second and momentous section of the Prologue. All of the works of this series, produced in 2022-23, comprise uncanny images of interiors. Before discussing these works further, I would like to elaborate on a composition "in-between." In this work, Closed (2022), a total of eleven netted balls are seen on a tennis court. The painting, dominated by graphic elements, inevitably evokes the tennis player who could not pass these balls to the other side. It is not difficult to imagine what kind of mood the athlete is in as the balls they hit were caught in the net, as they could not make progress and thus could not be rewarded for their efforts. At this point, Burcu develops a different narrative technique that had not been present in her previous works to construct a mise-en-scène by conjuring the figure that she had not yet shown to the audience through the elements that comprise the inner world of the figure. The striking component of the landscape, which seems to be a part of daily life, is the "film language" of the composition. Since the combination of elements such as the stage equipment, the installation, the editing of the set, and the light makes the viewer feel as if they are in front of a cinema frame, the feeling of "here, that moment when time stops" dominates this painting. One of the main features of Prologue is that the "individual" at the center of the narrative, developed by Burcu through the world of details, is felt but never revealed and is thus almost abstracted. In this sense, the tennis court emphasizes two different features as a stage. The first is that the global pandemic cuts the individual off from the world of current relations and drags the individual into acute loneliness, which they have not experienced before. The other is the alienation triggered by this loneliness. When the artist carries the mise-en-scène fictions that she launched with the tennis court, that is, the outdoors, to interiors, houses, rooms, corridors, and halls, she begins to map the worlds of the individual/s she does not show and to create bridges that go "beyond the image." Those who have crossed these bridges will perhaps be a little surprised to find a world of sensations of their own under their feet. This hidden grotesqueness—entirely unexpected from painting, especially from the canvas—is one of Prologue's surprises.

Moments When Time Stands Still

The strangeness of the mise-en-scène elements in the compositions of the Interior series evoking in the audience the houses they have known before, the houses they have lived in, and the spaces they spend time in is certain. When we look at details such as ceilings, doors, and windows in the spaces designed by Burcu, we encounter the modernist details of the 1950s. Tables, chairs, lamps, armchairs, cabinets, carpets, plants, and paintings hung on the walls in compositions draw attention to the feeling of "I remember this place," which entraps the audience at once. The existence of "intermediate times" is felt in these compositions, in which figures with different experiences move back and forth, up and down, even if they do not appear or be seen. At twilight and dusk, architectural spaces become almost fantastically quiet when the sun goes down or rises. Art history is full of trends, sensibilities, and tendencies developed by talented artists from Pittura Metafisica to Hyperrealism, who pursue this silence. I am deeply interested in Burcu's pursuit of this with a brush on the canvas, especially in an era when digital manipulation techniques focus on the most unthinkable details and manage to scrutinize "the moments when time stands still." When I look at the prisms of light reflecting on the walls of the spaces, when I search from which source the details illuminating the most unlikely corners emerge, I also sense that the areas illuminated from two or three different points do not have an utterly correct perspective. When I see that there is no symmetry in spaces that are slightly slanted or that become strange because the corners are not aligned accurately, I can't help but ask myself, what does the artist want to do here?

Gaston Bachelard, in his extraordinary work The Poetics of Space (La Poétique de l'Espaces), is in favor of approaching architecture with Phenomenological philosophy methods and considering living spaces, the house, as an imaginary structure:

“Maybe it is a good thing for us to keep a few dreams of a house that we shall live in later, always later, so much later, in fact, that we shall not have time to achieve it. For a house that was final, one that stood in symmetrical relation to the house we were born in, would lead to thoughts—serious, sad thoughts—andnot to dreams. It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality.”

The houses we see in Burcu's exhibition, Prologue, converge at specific points with Bachelard's views. As I have mentioned before, the richness of detail in these compositions, in which the artist has abandoned perspective, symmetry, and reality, the characteristic of reviving the memories in the audience's minds is very present. The feeling of being marked by an experience that can be gathered sometimes from the corner of an old shelf, sometimes from an opaque lamp hanging from the ceiling, and sometimes through a rug with partially erased motifs functions like an invitation to revive the personal experiences of the audience. Burcu interprets architecture as a kind of shell in her paintings—happy or sad, or ambiguous in a way specific to childhood—animating the residues in the viewer's memory and thus activating architecture as the keeper and custodian of personal memory.

Yes, I know, I have arrived at a quite abstract description. However, in the exhibition Prologue, in which the artist's departure point is tangible fictions, questioning the exhibition through abstract notions could help develop a different interpretation. In Greek mythology, Titan, the representative of Mnemosyne memory, is the daughter of the Goddess Gaia and Uranus. From their union with Zeus of nine nights, they had nine daughters, known as muses. While Prologue addresses the residues of memory with its distinctive features, it also invites the audience to a world of sensation similar to the memory intensification in the Mnemosyne legend. In this world of feeling, the colors Burcu uses fearlessly push the classic warm-cold harmonies to one side and bring the compositions to a threshold. Is it a coincidence that at this threshold that conjures up the zeitgeist of the 1950s that is at once modest and modernist, comfortable and comprehensive, simple forms based on associations emerge? 

Burcu constructs "intermediate spaces" the existence of which we can never be sure about, considering the dangers of intense graphic effects in her compositions that fluctuate between reality and fiction, lived experience and dreams. Going even further, she adds large and small frames to the walls she depicts, in line with the image within image tradition. Those who look at the paintings with a little squint could, of course, gather information about what the images in the frames might be. Like other riddles from a riddle, these compositions, which come together and form different layers, remain undefined between the personal and the public, protecting them from repetition and an unnerving monotony of representation.

     March 2023, Düsseldorf