interview

An Interview With Banu Cennetoğlu

Simge Peker

I went to visit Banu Cennetoğlu in her Artist Book Project Space; BAS… I thought I was going to interview her about  ’15 Scary Asian Men’ work. She has got surprised about it. Certainly it was the time to talk about her most recent work; the Venice Biennale Project ‘The Catalog’. My aim was to discuss more about the role of photography and her style of documentation. But in the end of our talk we were at a far away point, which was much more exciting. Banu Cennetoğlu enlightened me about the actualization, materialization and monumentalization of photography.

 

BC It is interesting that you want to talk about ‘Scaries’… maybe because it is the most straightforward work of mine. 15 Scary Asian Men was first conceived and shown as an artist book in 2005. It was a hand-made edition of 15 books. Then for an exhibition in Gent, Belgium, I reproduced as an edition of 750, offset printing. What you saw in Antrepo during the 10th Istanbul Biennale, it was the installation version.

SP Where does the title come from?

BC The ‘Scary Asian Men’ comes from my school days. I used to live on the Asian side of Istanbul and my school was on the European side. I saw these men waiting there, on the highway that connects Asia to Europe. My impression was they are in a permanent state of waiting, almost a pause… In a way it is a possible representation of potentiality. We are not in control of the next act.

The state of suspension is something that I search ways to register. You can see the same intention also in my other works.

But in terms of approach ‘Scary Asian Men’ is different from the others. No direct engagement with the subject/content. Conceptually, also infrastructure-wise it is a “shoot and run“ piece. The reason why they are called ‘Scary Men’ is very simple. When people from Europe come to Istanbul they say: ‘how many men are in Istanbul just gazing at things, without doing anything.’ Basically it is about the fear of Europeans. They think when they open the doors to Europe for us, this ‘nothing to do’ men are going to invade Europe. The message is very ironic and very illustrative. The second part of the work is the star. The star, which appears on the cover of the book and in the installation version of the work, comes from the European Union. The installation has a projection of a star, which is constantly wiggling, hitting the walls of the room and the photographs. Not only destructive for the viewers but it is also a very self-destructive star. The star sabotages the photographs but also it struggles in itself. The star symbolizes Turkey like all the other stars in EU… Turkey is a separated one looking for its own identity moving around. While it sabotages itself it cannot also find a place in the system.
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Suddenly we start to talk about her work at Venice Biennale: The Catalog.

BC The Catalog is a kind of a mail order catalog. It includes everything; from very personal to very iconic… From 11th September to Yugoslavian war, then my cousins, even myself… The contents are very different from each other. The way they follow each other is the result of a very edited, not random, almost manipulative montage. It is nothing accidental. It questions how we do perceive the image. How do we select the image and how do we relate ourselves to images? If we don’t know the real story behind the image how can we read it? How can we criticize it? What makes the image ‘the next’ when it is listed in a catalog like this… What does it mean to us? What do these groups mean to us, especially if we don’t know the original idea behind? If there is a category how do we judge the relationship between the category and its contents? Catalog is a work that questions all of these, basically itself and also an archive of my last 15 years…

SP Here I notice that you also question the problem with categories and our urgent need to categorize things…

BC Yes. The categories in the catalog are very personal. Of course I also try to question the content and classification relationship. I think photography is a fragile and problematic discipline. It can only show things. It is all about depiction and display… I wanted to maximize this point. The Catalog by being an artist’ book, a work of art on its own, it also performs as a real catalog where you like a product and you can get it.

In the installation, next to the catalogs, I placed free – download forms.
By marking the code which can be found on the top right corner of each photograph and taking the form with him/ herself, one could download for free any photo from the Catalog, but only and exclusively during the period of Venice Biennale…

It is a comment on the market, production and distribution systems. You can see as a functional intervention or a performative gesture.
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Banu Cennteoğlu has got a very teasing eye on the question of categorization and consumption. The Catalog includes many pictures of forgotten political situations.

BC A friend told me The Catalog has almost 15 different exhibitions inside. A collection of different issues, like the homeless people in Japan living in blue boxes, or a man in a urban landscape standing alone. A small figure in a big landscape… They are being only tools for an aesthetic visual production. These series are titled ‘Composition’ in the catalog. They are only tools for a right composition. They just look nice!

There is an index part in the end of the catalog. You can find about the places and dates of the photographs. For example here you find the picture of a man standing between the North and South Korean border…
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 In the end the work ‘Catalog’ is a true assumption of Banu’s work. The issues she has been trying to tell piece by piece for years are finally actualized with this catalog. The question, which is being answered, might be about the feature of photography: What does happen when you use photography as a real tool but not only as an aesthetic or fragile display…

BC This work is almost a monument, but about the fragility of photography. It monumentalizes itself and it sabotages itself just like a monument does…

SP How far did this work achieve its goal during the biennale?

BC Especially during an exhibition like the Venice Biennale, where everything is fast and spectacular, showing such a work means eliminating half of the viewers. There is limited number of people during such an event, which can give the time and attention to look at the catalog page by page. Most of them look at my book like looking at a normal catalog. The paper quality and the form of the book also have similar quality. The fact that the content is overwhelmingly too much; after a while it risks to become a black hole for the viewer. It becomes untakeable…

 ‘Catalog’ is a very strong work repeating its aim many times within itself. With its wits, with its contradictions, with its effects… The struggle against materializing, categorizing and labeling is quite voiced in this work. The Catalog exists overlaying its concepts and its goals. Banu’s work also gives us glimpses of a sabotage about our fragile issues over a very fragile discipline…