Textless Body: Bodiless Text exhibition by Selmanpakoğlu:
11.11.2022 / Exhibition

My artistic and academic research focuses on the changeability of our way of being and social order. While social reality and human identities are our constructs, our resistance to changing them is linked to whether we accept our existential freedom or not. Instead of embracing freedom, social structures and identities get stuck in ascribed constructed meanings. These meanings are thus conceived and “fixed” through language.

The text in the language has a "meaning" as well as a body, that is, a form. The body of the text can also be thought of as the human body, as human constructs the "meaning". Both are deconstruction because "meaning" is attributed to the text and differs with time and recipient. The meaning ascribed to the present cannot be actually grasped; because it is always active. Therefore, in this exhibition, I am playing with the body of “meaning” which cannot be grasped, fixed and therefore undecidable. To play with the variability of the meaning and body of the text is actually to play with the revealed variability of the human being.

The vast pictogram, cuneiform, ideogram abstraction and semantic process of ancient ceramic tablets clearly show the human urge to attribute "meaning". The mobility used in the ceramic tablets, which were created by transforming the cuneiform script, which was taken as the starting point in the exhibition, into unreadability and revealing the spelling of contemporary letters with engraving, sealing and silkscreen printing, triggers the self-reflection and ultimately the change of the human being on himself and his text, by betraying the fictionality of the language and its constructedness. Thus, the text transforms contextual and formal symbols and bodies in motion into timeless texts and bodies, leaving them in their own emptiness.

Human bodies shaped by crusty mud clay as a contrarian method; By using his freedom, he frees himself from the definition and fixation of language and returns to his unwritten bodies, and lives his flexibility, decline, silence, abandonment, that is, his transformation potential in its emptiness.

The starting notes, which are written in today's "handwriting", which constitute the theoretical structure of the exhibition, are printed on tracing paper, especially with light transmittance. As man became competent in using his hand, he developed his brain and created "human language". These handwritten notes are thus a deciphering of the deconstruction already immanent to language itself, subverting the "meaning of the text" with its own agent. Thus, while the alterable corrupted fiction of language/writing/text/body creation and technology is represented in the exhibition, it is seen that the dismantling of the structure is already the immanent agent of the text and the body itself.