Even though each travel is a moment of freedom and repose for a working person, Ayşe Erkmen had revealed that the artist always has time for leisure, yet simultaneously any second is a moment of reflection for her or him. And she was reminding us that if the time considered as liberty and freedom is not assigned to thinking, then it is allotted to consuming. And now she shows us how the moments that look like recreation are an accelerated game operating through a corporate culture. Thus, with this exhibition, she reminds us that even the one’s dream of freedom comes at a cost.
From this perspective, Erkmen suggests that the freedom of travelling and living is a situation deferred. The distance is covered in this period of deferment. We get the feeling that we are somewhere else. A feeling of freedom develops in our consciousness. However, when we ask “is it liberation?”, we will perceive that our time is being grabbed by that city advertiser or this travel company. Ayşe Erkmen expresses this in an implicit manner, provoking us to ponder this situation.
American literature of the modern ages has thought about roads for years: From Melville to Miller, from Lawrence to the Beat Generation, to Kerouac, many of them have written on roads and displacements. This is also the literature of de-territorialization. Defying psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic interpretations centered on the indicative, which is the tool of linguistics, they have materialized the notion of the surface through roads. And Ayşe Erkmen’s videos, as is the case with American literature, show us that the roads and travels she considers as living spaces are superficial, and when the depth is dragged towards the surface the extent to which the images offered to us are artistic images to ponder on.
Living, then, is thinking; it is passing through roads...
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