Mk Yurttas

2019

From : Istanbul
To: Berlin

Secreted Functions

Interdisciplinary, Visual Arts

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https://vimeo.com/322650046

How did this grant contribute to the realization of your project in regard to artistic exchange, local cultural development and/or the promotion of cultural diversity?

With the help of this grant, I realized a performance artwork entitled “Secreted Functions” with my artistic partner Aslı Dinc in Neuköln, Berlin. From 2012 we are working as an artist duo AslieMk and before this performance we didn’t collaborate with any artist from different cultural background. We have always worked with Turkish artists who are mostly living in Istanbul. We performed in Top Transdisciplinary Project Space which is in between a scientific laboratory and an art space. Top is runned by 20 people who are from different cultural and professional backgrounds such as curators, critics, writers, scientists and researchers from different countries. Our performance was curated by Tuce Erel who is a co-founder of the space on behalf her reading group on posthumanism. Local people attending these reading sessions came to watch us and we had a chance to exchange our ideas on posthumanism through an artistic perspective. In our performance we worked with scientist/artist Mirela Alistar who is also a co-founder of Top. Our performance is about the exchange of a mixed liquid which is mostly our salivas between two bodies through a transparent hose pipe and during our performance Mirela analysed this liquid that we spitted to petri dishes. She projected these analysises visually on a wall from her computer linked to a microscope during the performance, so our performance artwork was being analysed by a researcher instantly and exhibited to the spectators. Mirela Alistar is working and living in Berlin but she studied science at Denmark and Romania universities so she shared her artistic/scientific experiences and ideas that she gained from these cultures. On the second day, we made a workshop at Top Lab with her and discussed the results of the analyses for our further collaborations. Neuköln is one of the multicultural zones of Berlin and people living there whom are mostly artists were interested at our performance and joined us because the space is at street level with glass facades. Other artists living in different zones of Berlin also came and watched our performance, they shared their thoughts on our work and we had a chance to discuss with them.

How does exchange, networking and international contacts contribute to the development of your artistic and cultural project?

As an artist duo, we are planning to continue our collaboration based on this performance with artist/scientist Mirela Alistar and in our workshop we began to discuss on how this can happen in different countries. She’s working with laboratories and will continue her academic research in USA, so we want to realize the second part of this collaboration between Turkey and USA. At the end of March 2019, we will realize a new performance with the curator Tuce Erel at 1A Space in Hong Kong. This new work will be the second part of of collaboration on the theme of posthumanism and there we will be part of an exhibition that is an education programme of Art Basel Hong Kong on March 2019. We will be exhibiting our artwork there with the artists from Germany, Turkey and Hong Kong.

Can you elaborate on the learning and knowledge you have gained and shared throughout this experience?

With this experience, we have learned a different culture’s artistic values throughout our performance. I learned that Berlin has a multicultural and interdisciplinary audience because we had different comments than our performances in Istanbul. In İstanbul people are seeing our work in a quite narrow point of view and their comments are mostly about understanding what we were doing during the performance. In Berlin people were more engaged to our work, they had an opinion on what we were doing and our content. Not only they interpreted the conceptual frame, but also they said that they had a visual taste. After our performance they just didn’t ask the questions, they shared their opinions on our work freely and we thought that they observed and interpreted our work based on theirselves. This experience was kind of a relationship between us, audience and a performance that we always tried to free our works from our authorship and make a performance artwork that can be reproduced through audience’s different points of view.