Banu Birecikligil

Eat me Protect me

Evrim Altug

In her first show the viewer was faced with childhood as a reference point where young girls were caught between being spectators to various natural and manmade disasters and/or being the suspected protagonists of the same. The undefined line between arsonist and spectator.

In the latest show by Birecikligil we revisit maybe the same geography but from a different perspective. This is a tourist visa to a place we had forgotten, to a more innocent time where one had the security of the imagination. Away from the calcified, stagnant, industrial hyperreality of the now. A chance to revisit the heroes, and talismans of our past, and walk through the gardens of our childhood with a mature sense of consciousness.

x-ist 14 Frames from the lost journal of the era of migrant images. These are orphans caught between a daydream and a photograph, swinging unconsciously, too and fro, from the irrefutable solidity of the canvas, as if rubbed with colors, these are Birecikligil’s (Ph)otoportrait/copy caught between the destiny of a decomposing collage and the possibility of “just another”. It is solely the responsibility of the viewer to refute or identify with the 14 frames of her imagination. It would be appropriate to say that the text you read now is like reading the prospectus to an unknown medication. It is up to the viewer whether to ingest this medication. They are all present, but in a strange mature awareness, placed out of the reach of children: An ownerless dog, residential refuse only present in a Sunday of our lost past, because this is the hurly-burly of the forgotten faces of the familiar. The patched motif, the indicator of the indicator, the absurdly forbidden common tale, rich with denial. The researcher side of these paintings that only become visible hide, the realist mind that deceives itself with fantasy, to paint your self in a corner on the canvas, trapped unawares. But in some way this is also very tiring, the look in the eyes of the seven dwarfs who are only together out of the commonality of their height. The temporariness of this cacophony is witness to its overly planned internal structure and state. Birecikligil’s paintings are like a séance calling upon the soul of Brecht with brush strokes, with disapproval spreading vinegar like across a passively lit landscape, the figures subjected to “conspira-sition” in their “composition”, the fate of these incomplete views and construction elements are similar. The eternal looser, exhibitionist who has never been able to fool its own introspective, speed-desensitized city eyes, OR, a surrealist naïve world stuffed under the weight of an imagination, alone and abandoned by the artist. If it was up to me I would tell you stop reading. The rabbits, princesses, dinosaurs and even the dogs and the whales have been watching you with a great huger from the start. Just like a fantasy covered, cheap plastic photo album looking for a purpose, they are hungry for your memory.