The Sick and the Building, Borga Kantürk, September 25 - November 10, 2012, Gallery NON

The artist, in his first exhibition ‘Cafe Recordis’, that took place again at NON (Tophane) focused on emancipation and recalling the past, through processes of transformation and awaiting / anticipation, by taking a cafe as a reference point. In this exhibition, Kantürk points out to the planned and gloomy structural organizations of the buildings of educational institutions oriented towards research in various disciplines such as fine arts, health etc. He draws attention to the notions of timelessness, feeling lost and sick, bureaucracy and status; on the basis of the struggle of the individual against the idle time spent in these spaces and against mobbing of the building, in working environments with small and standardized divisions. He examines the obstacles that knowledge generation and research encounter in these aforementioned spaces. The network relations that are maintained by bureaucracy, negligence and indifference in the building and the attempts of the employees to open up a small, private and secure space for themselves are central to the exhibition.

The exhibiton is named after ‘Sick Building Syndrome’ which was officially identified by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 1984.  This syndrome, a composite of complaints related mainly to office surroundings, is stated to have similar symptoms to a bunch of other diseases. The artist calls attentions to the fact that particularly state buildings subject people to certain negative effects and originate factors that trigger one to feel sick. The foziness of the bureaucratic body represented by the building and the mechanics of the repetitive and self-accumulative tasks sets forth a contradiction. The mechanism made up of these kinds of tasks, is pursued by systematic and numerical tools such as insurance, identification and security numbers and result documents. The exhibition ‘The Sick and the Building’ appear as a research on the survival attempts and deliberate struggles the employees have developed against the sicknesses of this system. The main question ‘Is it the building itself that makes one sick, or is the feeling of sickness a fictional sensation?’ stands as a point of departure for the exhibition.

Inspired by the characters; that struggle with modernity, bureaucracy and these corporate spaces, of Herman Melville, Franz Kafka and George Perec, Kantürk will represent the sickness discussed above, in 4 separate chapters: Office, Corridor / Labyrinth, Building and Journey. The artist will create an atmosphere that records, while also restructures a working space in 4 distinct rooms of the exhibition area, with the use of various media of photography, video, drawing and casual objects.