Flow Out | isthisit

"Yesterday the Lazy River was green. Nobody knows why. Theories abound. They all involve urine. Either the color is the consequence of urine or is the color of the chemical put in to disguise the urine or is the reaction of urine to chlorine or some other unknown chemical agent. I don’t doubt urine is involved. I have peed in there myself. But it is not the urine that we find so disturbing. No, the sad consequence of the green is that it concentrates the mind in a very unpleasant way upon the fundamental artificiality of the Lazy River. Suddenly what had seemed quite natural—floating slowly in an unending circle, while listening to the hit of the summer, which itself happens to be called “Slowly”—seems not only unnatural but surpassingly odd."

The Lazy River, Zadie Smith

December 2017

Welcome

to the online edition of our collective

exhibition FLOW OUT took place at Bilsart video art space in Istanbul between May 29 – June 30, 2019.

Artists: Funa Ye, Istanbul Queer Art Collective

Curators: Collective Çukurcuma

(Naz Cuguoğlu, Mine Kaplangı)

Curated by Collective Çukurcuma (Naz Cuguoğlu & Mine Kaplangı) FLOW OUT included video works of Funa Ye and Istanbul Queer Art Collective (Tuna Erdem & Seda Ergul) alongside a public program that included a live performance streaming by Istanbul Queer Art Collective from London, a talk by curators, and a skype session with the artist Funa Ye on her video Flying Dance. This program is based on the common practice of thinking, expressing and writing collectively about the present. As the co-authors, we continued to write an collective essay through email exchanges—no one is the owner of the piece whereas each of us is a participant. FLOW OUT does not belong to a place—taking place across Beijing, London, Istanbul, Berlin, Amsterdam, San Francisco. It refers to contemporaneity, questioning the problem of authorship in collaboration, and experimenting with the idea of thinking and producing together.

The first week of the exhibition started with the screening of the video work of Beijing-based artist Funa Ye, titled Flying Dance which is a 30-minute long video collage. This work is the first part of the series Self-fiction, which the artist completed as part of an artist residency program in Berlin in 2017. These stories give reference to the identities created over the Internet and to the early periods of online dating. The viewer follows the female characters through time, inspired by television programs in China. This work focuses on the effects of gender and identity issues, the emergence of the Internet and especially online dating while resurrecting a scene from the “Sims” game.

The second week kicked off with Istanbul Queer Art Collective- based in London- meeting the Istanbul audience with the video documentation of their performance titled Psychic Bibliophiles—creating an oral archive of excess, fetishism, and desire. This performance was realized during the opening day of the travelling-exhibition House of Wisdom, curated by Collective Çukurcuma at Framer Framed (Amsterdam, 2017). As part of FLOW OUT, the artists performed a repetition of this performance in the exhibition space and also gave a talk on their previous work titled Just in Bookcase— a wooden suitcase filled with artists’ personalized library cards, memorabilia, and photos—which inspired the making of the performance.

To read our collective text,

to visit the online edition of this exhibition

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