Inspired by an old Turkish song, Kimseye Etmem Şikâyet (I Won’t Complain to Anyone), Lara Ögel portrays a woman who paints a wall in an image dating back to the 50’s. While whether the woman knocks a door or examines the wall remains ambiguous, these two questions somehow clamp together. She may well be in a dream while painting the flower patterns on the wall in grey. In the meanwhile, a child emerges suddenly and starts peeking inside the house from outside. As the scene turns black and white, the house turns into a dollhouse. In the image that comes immediately after, color scales create a binary opposition with the image of a flower blossoming in nature. Dialectically, this binary image-synthesis touches upon the togetherness of a human’s hand and the selfhood of the flower. Similarly, the paint put on the wall moves back and forth.
Man touches nature with his hands. The hand intervenes in nature as a tool and transforms it. A hand-squeezed paint tube moves back and forth – showing us that time evolves in a nest moving forwards and backwards. It is again time that prepares us for the serene and silent happiness of the interior of the house, shown from different angles, as much as it does prepare us for storms. (Swelling waves and the interior of the house in the same scene do exist together.) In the last image, a person’s efforts to run in two different directions all but indicate that humans, in a dialectical manner, gravitate to one direction only to opt for another afterwards.
Lara Ögel attempts to show that time functions as a tool of memory in this video, just as she does in her exhibition “Public Confidentiality” running at Contemporary Istanbul followed by Açıkekran New Media Arts Gallery. She also examines the togetherness of “hand and art” from the viewpoint of a difference. A baby’s hand in one corner of the video image comes close to the hand of the adult who uses the paint. These two hands – mother and child – are reminders of one another. The hand transforms things, but memory belongs to the mind, rather than the hand.
Readymade images and the artist’s thoughts interlock with one another in a disposition, as if in an attempt to reveal that art is addressed as a “coşa mentale” since Leonardo.