What is Socially Engaged Art: Derya Akay at Unit 17 explores Turkish culture, cooking, decay + more

“Flowers from a Story”
socially engaged art installation and wall works by Derya Akay
May 31 to July 13, 2024
Unit 17 Contemporary Art
310 - 207 West Hastings Street
Vancouver, BC
open Thursday to Saturday from Noon to 5pm
text by Leo Cocar
Where do we locate the contours of history? How do we trace its edges? Perhaps even more difficult to pin down, is the shape of the fleeting object known as the story, the atomic particle that builds towards grand arching narratives that structure humanity’s understanding of the self, on a more meta-level. Delineating the story, within cliché and narrow frameworks such as time or geography, feels like a disservice, a negation of the poetics that comes from letting the story fray and spiral, extending itself beyond itself. Rather, to really get at the story, I think it is more productive to think of the story’s afterlife or that which sits in a permanent state of parallel play.
Naturally, the story must have a vessel. Normally, this repository occurs in the written word. But I think language is sometimes too singular, too limited and sometimes authoritative - a single voice speaking. I like to think that the container for the story can lay outside of language, a porous aggregate, polyphonic in its silence. A physical thing, small, diminutive, and yet, the sum of all parts. A thing that (continuously and forever) collects, hoards, and indexes the traces of a chorus of innumerable lives lived.
Here, Akay provides a provisional set of answers for these queries. The bond between chronicle and material is undoubtedly alluded to in the show’s title but further distilled into the objects themselves, as combines of both material poetics and signs. Akay’s works record and translate generations of history, carrying this yoke with both playful levity and driven commitment - precise and open to the world.
Containers become meeting places become cork board become sounding become archive become garden become friends become the harvest become flowers become traces of petals become doily tchotchkes become pure pattern become your grandmother’s living room become memorial become social structure (architecture) become titanic migrations become a refusal to foreclose anything because to reduce this honed point to an eternally honed point would be a psychotic hallucination.
Much of this work is a forking path responding to the fundamental problem that the artist’s world is formed or affected, in one way or another, by the “longue durée” of ethno-fascist politics in their turk-ish homeland, a desperate project to accumulate power through the erasure of everything outside of a revisionist fantasy, through forced conversion, the erasure of languages, and traditions, and peoples - in short, the effacement of mediums for history’s transmission. Akay’s work is, in a sense, a rebuke, a denial of authoritarianism’s denial of the “multiple” for the one. These works contend with this fraught history of obliteration by the making of historical records of their own, which contend with the afterlives of these regimes on their own understanding of the world, while leaving a poetic space where the memorial can be a flower, an index, a pattern, or an open question.
For additional information, please visit ...
www.unit17.org/

[@jofferm4050]

I enjoyed this. Don't know much about this type of art but you put it in a historical context that is easy to relate to. My opinion is still out though on whether I consider this art or not but it made me think that just because it's on the wall doesn't mean it's art. Thanks ... I'm getting fucked up now .. just kidding aside.

[@PaulpresentsART]

Thanks for your comment and your continued support of my channel through your insights. I don't think this type of art will fuck you up too much though .. lol ... more a matter of getting used to the idea. I think your idea about art is progressive and I appreciate that. 👍