THE MAN

2006, London

Penelope’s famous web covers a female world that constantly closes in on itself. There are but few woman’s stories that are as tragic as the one of the woman who weaves the same web each day and undoes it each night to avoid her suitors. What is tragic is not the tears that are shed nor the misfortunes but the inactivity peculiar to a woman who constantly does the same action to delay what can happen to her in a world of men. Weaving,sewing, embroidering are precisely actions peculiar to this inactivity and are literally female tasks.In principle this specificity pertaining to the female world does not stem from a feminine characteristic rooted in the nature of the task.On the contrary, at issue here is the question of time and its concomitant space.Embroidering something on fabric without ultimately producing any surplus value; sewing is a pastime. And leisure time fits perfectly the woman who does not take part in production, and insofar as she does not take part in it shuts herself up at home with hidden desire.Inside and outside these are the surface signs of a greater split deeper within.This divide is somewhere between an extended present that occurs with inactivity, with seclusion, and a time in which progress and hopes and plans for the future strike roots. The steamships and men’s hats which Yesim Akdeniz has sewn out of fabric and on which are embroidered the first letter of “FORTSCHRITT” sail on these dangerous waters in terms of both technique and content. ( and indeed we will be questioning the possibilities of differentiation between content and form in Yesim Akdeniz ). The aforementioned danger lies in the inflation of meanings in the cultural and gender discourses that enfold our actions.

...However , borrowing visual dogmas that culture imposes and attributes to women, Yesim has

made ships and hats that are not in the least masculine.The ships with pink smoke coming out of their stacks and the hats with embroideries and the fabric selected in their background are like part of a vaudeville show.Far from carrying the masculine power they promise, they sway as transexual images.Thus the phallic discourse the objects point to is disrupted.Do objects to which we attribute masculine meanings have meanings that are overblown and that, actually ,could deliquesce at any moment? Imposing on us through monstrous erotic politics the codes, it has conceived for its own continuity; is that what the discourse is doing? Is that what we have been trying to sustain as sexual subjects a constructed false subjectivity? Are these subjectivities doomed to be inverted by the artist , to be deprived of their meaning? It becomes impossible for the “F” of “FORTSCHRITT” to echo progress on such a transexual plane .In Yesim Akdeniz’s work, the fierce momentum caused by the invention of the steam engine does not bring to mind positive associations as could be imagined.The artist approaches all humanity with an attitude that is ironical and aloof from positive progress, which is thought to serve universal and humanistic purposes.And truly, is progress something that acts for us without discrimination? Or has there not been any such progress from the outset?

catalogue text “weaving the image, touching the image” by Isiltan Ataman for the exhibition