HAND ANEW, A NEW END: Interview with Baha Görkem Yalım
13/04/2022
Ilgın Deniz Akseloğlu
Regarding an Invisible Kite
Some encounters circulate so effortlessly in space-time that one abstains from startling them, while dragging them down the lines of language. Ever since we met at their exhibition in Paris1 in the fall of 2018, Baha Görkem Yalım has been evoking in me such feelings. What I often distinguish in his works, mostly produced in video, performance and text forms, is rendering of an ongoing, almost endless derivation, swelling, or layering so motionless that it ends up looking like a sculpture or pedestal. This limpid and freezing contrast is being put to test right at the intersection of cyclical universal movement with human perception and body. A continual movement creates attempts and encounters that are similar but not repetitive, and determined to be restless. In these works, the discourse shaped and marked by Yalım's manner of creating opens the way for possible liberations at the 'world' level, despite the pressures and chasms created by the conflicts between history and individual, origin and memory, consciousness and belonging. The layers emerging between the borders of conflict can breathe, they find their rhythms and reach their hands. This hand, whose point of contact is never fully clarified, fervently celebrates the disappearance of borders. This hand is freed from boasting and desire for recognition. Twitchless. Like absolute silence. It goes on and never gives up. In the absence of language, the silence of the hand is at work. Maybe that's why all situations created by Yalım are intented for being lived rather than written about. We met each other in the first months of 2021 in Amsterdam where we were isolated from urban life under conditions of semi-quarantine. We talked about simplicity, accidents, and casualties of the inseparably fused practice of art-life, about embracing phantom existence, being in the body, contamination, history, and water.
Baha Görkem:
Recently I’m far too preoccupied with water, it seems. I am reading Bodies of Water by Astrida Neimanis. Neimanis' ‘watery bodies’ are similar to Deleuze's 'body without organs'. 'You can never completely dissolve', they both say, it is possible only to some degree. In the same vein, I try to penetrate into the thinkers who stand for impurity and contamination. It could be Donna Haraway, it could be Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. I need to read Luce Irigaray too. These are the places I wander around.
Ilgın Deniz:
Do you choose what you read with a pull or do you find yourself pushed towards it as a project? I mean project in the following sense: I call project ‘the image one seeks to turn into’. Maybe this state of “adopting a project” defines a more masculine way of becoming…
BG: I choose them by being pulled. I realized that I was not interested in the project. As you go through life, you produce something, as a life-form, as a by-product of life. I can't see them like projects. So maybe not being so milli-specific goes in parallel with this. An exhibition all of a sudden becomes a matter of display, that's when milli-specificity comes into play as a social and spatial concern. For me, the body itself is a project. It's a very harmful point of view, I wish I could let it go, but I see the body as a project, as if it will get better, like a field that I can control more effectively, get to know better, but actually, it's not like that. It is something that is constantly being destroyed and rebuilt. It is heart-breaking to regard it as a project in progress. The gap is widening more and more. On the other hand, the same applies to the problem with modernity. I'm ready for that disappointment.
Remembrance’s Stench
ID: Bodilyness is scary. Perhaps because of the historically coded limits of the body? Elizabeth Grosz, in Volatile Bodies, discusses the concept of boundary as a product of masculine philosophy that creates a 'dangerous foreign territory’... I've started to understand body better and better, I'm still learning.
BG: I still haven't learned. I realized too late that I had a body. Of course, in a way, this is like a way of dealing with trauma, living by ignoring the body. That's why it's important. This realization came about with the sense of trust provided by the community that I have met during the graduate program2 we both went through, and everything changed after that.
However, I marvel at people who are hyper-aware of their bodies, and can use their bodies very well. They are driven by the idea that everyone has a body. They are unaware that many people are unaware that they have bodies. Some performance artists, people who are engaged in movement, think that being in the body is something given.
ID: When I think of bodilyness, I consider it as being one of the objects of participation in time that is always linear and lineal, and then this linearity gets destroyed immediately. I came here in February, right? For instance, we haven't seen each other in March and now that one month feels very long. March takes too long every year. It takes 62 days, not 31.
On the other hand, consciousness trains itself so well against these tricks of the body, and it is always in pursuit of getting used to living in peace by detaching itself from the body, just like a zeppelin. When it is not balanced, it can neither rise up nor go down. Oscillating in between, it is still possible to calm down within the body and keep observing. I find those times very strange. It's like being suspended. There is a feeling of being physically inaccessible, of not being able to touch.
BG: I think it is something formed by a chain of rhythms that dissolves the body into its environment but also prevents it from disappearing by a complete dissolution. These rhythms vibrate, for example, with gender variance and division of labor. Similarly, doing sports. When you join into the rhythm of sports, that is, of mechanical movement and repetition, your body has its own time. On certain days, and at certain times of that day, it is under your control to reach the point where you will exhaust yourself so much that you will not be able to give a thought. The recovery process regulates everything immediately. This is encouraging.
Kathy Acker has a short essay, Against ordinary language, on the relationship between repetitions and the body while bodybuilding, i.e. changing the area ofthe body. I always think about it while doing sports. I thought about writing in response to it, but like every task I take on, I left it unfinished! Not being able to finish anything has turned out to be a pathology, but it is also a strategy for me.
As if a Dog Sniffing a Dead Dog
ID: Does the idea of end feel wrong?
BG: When I think about my own practice, I don't believe anything is ever over. I see all works as processes; these works get crystallized only at certain points where they meet specific audiences. These points can be something installed, like exhibitions, or they can be planned or unplanned short contacts. I continue to work on everything I produce. On the one hand, this tactic helps me cope with my inability to finish or the fear of finishing it. On the other hand, things really don't end. That's why there are 75 versions of my portfolio, the dates and contents of the works always keep changing. However how can you see them all produced without yourself turning into a factory? It's a bit difficult. Or maybe it is necessary to turn into a factory at some point. Of course, this is highly connected with space. Maybe this is what we call studio.
ID: But isn't this very natural? Throughout this process, they are spawned from time to time, they live all the time. Then it seems like they start to look like something, but they keep talking. They change as they talk. In the beginning of April, I participated into a research conference with sound-poems, and for the first time, I had the chance to express a few things that I had been thinking about for a long time. For example, one of my questions was: Poetry is written, fine, but then what? So what, if it is written? Is poem really over when it is written? I don't accept that. It should transform something, and it should be transformed as well. I can't stand the rapid consumption or even commodification of something expressed with an unconscious desire to communicate. This occasionally makes me go through very puritanical times, I become almost like a vicious nun. Now we read this, but what happened? I wrote it, but now what?
BG: When something continues to be written, or rather, when it is decided not to be finished, all worries about its next life disappear. When something comes into contact with people, I don't think it comes to an end, even though the audience perceives it as finished. Therefore, in our encounters with poetry, that is, after that contact is established, poetry also lives and changes with you. However when it is a book, it is not easy to talk like this, because in the end it is something that has been printed, signed, and endowed with a different life as an object.
When I say contamination, I mean these contacts as well, for me it’s a concept that includes all these; at least, in things I produce, this is what I try to achieve. I consider them as changeable, unfinished, living forms of labor that can come into contact with and penetrate into people, acting somehow like an RNA sequence re-encoding themselves with those people. A bit like a virus, not exactly a virus, because we're not talking about a capsule at all. However, the desire for professionalization, entering the market, etc., these demands made upon us from outside, whether we want it or not, are in sheer opposition with the desires I have mentioned above. In other words, it becomes very difficult to display unfinished works, let alone sell them. That's why you have to somehow keep secret the intentions behind your works. Everything becomes a bit of a mystery. I don't like it very much either because this also becomes an occasion for becoming introvert.
Couples (The eroticism of a secret that everyone knows)
ID: No! We are always in it. Contact is about touching. Mel Chin's biotech work Revival Field3 comes to mind. This is a square-shaped laboratory-garden project in the middle of a vacant lot. It is an area isolated from the outdoors, consisting only of special plants that eliminate the pollution caused by the release of metals such as zinc, cadmium, copper into the environment by the industry. These special plants proved themselves to be much more effective and environmentally friendly than many other methods invented in the struggle against air pollution. It is thought-provoking on contact, 'contamination' and borders.
So, is there any instance where consumption and contamination meet? Like the prospects for an object to somehow become contagious by being consumed?
BG: Quite the opposite actually. Consuming something means losing that contact for me. For to consume something, we have to abstract it, roll it up. And when we roll up, we can't touch it, imagine it like round masses touching and missing each other.
What is the opposite of it? Perhaps angular, drawing, interlocking things… I draw on geometric imagination to explain these contacts, it is easier to visualize it in this manner… So, I’d rather contact with sharp, sticky, etc. surfaces in life than smooth, hygienic, round surfaces.
ID: Well, when bringing up the question of consumption, can we think of metabolizing? Because somehow that object begins to oscillate by itself…
She was a wise man
BG: Yeah, it’s a bit like cannibal metaphysics,4 like transformation through ingestion, you eat your enemy, and it transforms you in return. Of course, it's possible to live like that, maybe we live like that too. The things we resist change us. Resisting… How have we moved from eating to resisting?
ID: Again, because there are limits. Actually, maybe the difference in definition for resisting and metabolizing is one of permeability. A post-human perspective brings the end of discontinuity, and spatial territorialization; temporal anachronism and delays are thereby eliminated. In any stance –or rather any situation- there is a political, cosmological, ecological dimension to it. This is what De Castro calls the permanent decolonization of thought. Is it possible not to be permeable?
BG: No way. That's what Neimanis actually focuses on in their book. Oceanic, ocean life… On the one hand, you consider ocean as an archive, from plastics to whales.
If, as a body of water, the ocean is undergoing incredible transformations under stress, it is impossible that we, as bodies mostly of water, are not subjected to specific transformations. It also seems impossible for us not to see ourselves as an archive in the same way. Likewise, it is impossible to think that we are not being pulled by the moon. That's why I like to think that we are permeable, fluid beings like water, whose borders are not very clear, because in this way we are able to stand against the subjectivist definition of human being imposed by the Enlightenment. It is a fatal mistake to be seen as independent units endowed with autonomy and authority. The future becomes a little more uncertain and a little more interesting when we consider that we are formless, fluid beings. Art is just like that for me. As soon as art works become independent, circumscribed things to be conserved, displayed and sold, they die further for me. By saying that, we also refer to conservation, and the museums becoming mausoleums. The situations where we come together with people, the places where we meet are interesting for me. It is much more preferable for me to imagine the conditions under which a painting exists and can come into contact with others rather than thinking about how I will paint it. An exhibition is only one of these forms of meeting. Meetings can take place in any form. I've been a slightly happier person since I realized it. I just want to contact people, that's all, there's nothing else I want to do. It's a good place for people like you, like me, who don't really see the difference between art and life exactly, and who experience everything as interweaved. But this is a little bit difficult situation. You become somewhat vulnerable, nothing can be closed completely, and there always exists a corner left open.
ID: For it's a very politicized place. Thus it is as if it needs to be reconstructed every single day. But this construction is not exactly like writing a fictional novel, instead, it is the need, or even the thirst, for starting each day with a new self -or selves-, addressing and welcoming the day from within this self. And it is more like constructing the occasions for it, creating them, or like existing at intersections. The intersection is as ambivalent as it is needed. Alphonso Lingis thinks that 'eroticism is essentially a desire to be violated'... How about that? Isn't that like a violation of borders again? Just like mortality which leads to an erotic connection with the Earth?
BG: Of course, watery bodies include an erotic idea in itself. As you said, we are in a constant state of mutation as beings with no clear boundaries. This being folds into itself and unfolds, while merging with other waters, it is not able to make cognitive distinctions. Eroticism in waters hitting the rocks, water overflowing from the glass or in condensing steam. As Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar says in A Mind at Peace; “For the sound of the sea is mightier than the sound of love and desire. In darkness, the roar of water spoke in tongues of Thanatos.”
She was a wise man
ID: This reminded of me that water is both an unstoppable cycle and a vast stasis. It has neither an end nor a beginning. The melting of motion into absolute continuity. We said that it is an overly politicized situation/stance when life and art are intertwined. This also brings to mind radicalism. Radicality is also used in biology, and the root of the word “radical” is the word root. In English, words like radish, and red are also derived from similar roots... What kind of a thing is root?
BG: When speaking of origin, it will not be necessary to refer to knowledge, I am aware of that. It is probably like this: since the very beginning, while talking about contamination, we also refer to the fact that there is no end, which in turn means that we ourselves have no end. If we constantly exist in each other, then it becomes unnecessary to talk about the beginning of something that has no end. Or rather, the beginning ceases to be a case and the question becomes reversed. Our very existence proves that there was a beginning, but I suppose we do not need to wonder what it was. On the one hand this is an accumulation of something, on the other hand it is present, it is an archive. We have found ourselves right back at the idea of archive once again. It's too intense to discuss the notion of accumulation. That's why I first assumed that it wouldn't be right to discuss knowledge. For you have to spill out or destroy things in order to lead your life like an archive. An archive that burns and remakes itself. So it's not an accumulation. There may not be much left for us to follow back, but it is clear from our being that it has a beginning and a deep past. The importance of meeting people comes from that. I can find in you the knowledge I have lost, and this is how we become roots for each other in the present. This is an important thing to me, to all of us, and in this way we start to solve our problem with time. I think it's gracious to confront big questions with small touches, small intensities of emotion. Being alive becomes a little more interesting when you look at it that way.
1 As if a dog sniffing a dead dog, Galeri Primo Piano, 2018
2 Dutch Art Institute
4 Cannibal metaphysics, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, 2015