Text zu der Galerieausstellung hybride (r)evolution von Uğur Ulusoy in der Galerie Setareh X

If anyone asks me how Uğur Ulusoy’s pictures appear to me, it’s like this:

First

Patti Smith writes in her book “Year of the Monkey” about how she takes a break from working. It’s August, she’s in Kentucky, it’s dawn, she’s going into the garden and “was drawn to strange movements on the stone ledge surrounding the garden. It was covered with black butterflies, scores of them, one on top of another, in a fluttering frenzy in the half-light.” Later, at night, she goes back to the butterflies, the light of her cell phone flashlight directed on them. “The black butterflies are still there, motionless, covering a portion of the ledge of the garden wall, but I can’t really tell if they are dead or just sleeping.” The moment when the artificial light falls on the butterfly wings, cutting through the darkness of the night and distinguishing the black-winged ones. Their distorted shadows, indices of their relationship to the smartphone light and to Patti Smith, who turns it on them.

Second

After surrealism had gone underground, it was clear that it would reappear one day. The nightmarish reality, the real dreams. We may (or hopefully) have overcome Freud, but not the fascination of incomplete sentences. Where something begins without ending. Where something ends without beginning. The thing is this: we have no choice but to seek the incomplete sentences. How, or some might ask with what, should we push our brain so that it can comprehend what is going on? A rhetorical question, of course, there is nothing. No liberation from one’s own inadequacy. No understanding of what holds the world together at its core. What is a beautiful idea, anyway, that there is something, a cohesion. A black and purple epicenter. Even surrendering to magic is useless. At the frayed edges one reality merges into another. It has become impossible to overlook things, the world is an unthinkable place. Crashing against the limit of what we can even understand. How does it feel?

The present is a continuous roll of thunder without rain. Grey skies, unbearably humid. Headache weather. You want to stand in the mist that keeps the vegetables fresh in the supermarket. Sometimes I think of the beginning of the year, of the fires, of charred baby kangaroos, oh, what peaceful times they were. That’s cynicism for one thing, and bullshit for another. People, they stand tiny in the great chaos of the times. Is it a human world that surrounds them? Yes and no. They seem to move on a borderline, in an intermediate stage, still human or already posthuman, but they are not alone, there are cyborgs or hybrid beings of technology and humans or supernatural figures. Architectural remains or beginnings of a new architecture. And nature, or-something-which-reminds-of-it, from which everything comes or into which everything merges, the colored streaks of existence, the twitching lightening of the endless present.

Again and again I meet people who ask questions about systemic problems and (try to) answer them without thinking of themselves. In a mystical way it is always them of all people who stand aside. I don’t know what the patent remedy is for this pseudo-like self-assurance and although it is certainly seductive (keyword: salvation of the soul), it remains self-deception at the expense of others. There is no outside of the power and no one who knows everything. I no longer want to be paternalistically patted on the head by people with God complexes. Here is an announcement on the supermarket radio: One day even the spray mist machine will not work anymore. Nice retreat attempt, but life is not without pain. We are exposed to the world and they to us. Can you stop denying your involvement in the circumstances? Can we contemplate the great connection without perceiving it as esoteric?

Third

“In extreme shortening, it can be said that hybridity exists when it is not identical with itself and is constantly reinventing itself.” Or-something-which-reminds-of-it, indexes that we don’t know what they refer to. That which aspires to the open. The function of categories. The radical contamination of purity. The staining of clean hands. The exposure of entanglements. The making of connections. This is not the end of the world, even if it feels that way. This is the world in the spotlight of us. This is us in the spotlight of the world.

More about Uğur Ulusoy: https://ugurulusoy.com/category/paintings/