| Spiritual…I can see that as a problem. To be made to think that something is spiritual when it’s not, I mean. Not that the translation is. A problem. Obviously translations are not ever free of problems. Chances are we simply won’t “get it” as the more dense the material gets, such troubles double. The symbolism in Füge Demirok’s work is open to me: names and shapes are familiar from being exposed to Sufis while growing up in Turkey. I ask Demirok if she has a teacher giving her practice. She mumbles something, blowing me off. It can be interpreted as a yes, or a no for that matter. I take it, putting it together with her body language, as a yes. |
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Tchera Niyego is the curator of Füge Demirok’s recent exhibition at Broadway Gallery.
Spiritual…I can see that as a problem. To be made to think that something is spiritual when it’s not, I mean. Not that the translation is. A problem. Obviously translations are not ever free of problems. Chances are we simply won’t “get it” as the more dense the material gets, such troubles double.
The symbolism in Füge Demirok’s work is open to me: names and shapes are familiar from being exposed to Sufis while growing up in Turkey. I ask Demirok if she has a teacher giving her practice. She mumbles something, blowing me off. It can be interpreted as a yes, or a no for that matter. I take it, putting it together with her body language, as a yes.
A poem that reads: “Sealed; we are / From Primordial Past to the Ultimate Future / How is it possible to think it as nothing / To wander around without a care, without a cure…” accompanied her recent exhibition. Demirok ripens her perception that “no-thingness” is what one can grow into. This is an ambitious attempt indeed, as anyone involved in such pursuits would know only too uncomfortably well.
Demirok wants us to pay attention as well to be certain. However she asks us to pay attention to the seemingly empty space that is inseparable from the “thing” that is also her work, that is the seemingly solid bulk of bronze or sometimes wood. The “no-thingness” that Demirok points to with these works does not refer to a void or to an absence of something. We’re not asked to look at no-bronze phenomenon as opposed to bronze for it’s own sake. This “nothing” is in fact so absolutely and ultimately full that it cannot be articulated by our senses. It is, so to speak, what makes things what they are and not anything else.
Demirok’s works suggests that this—seemingly—empty space specifies the thing. We cannot solidify this no-thing into an existence, nor can we write it off as a nonexistence. We will never figure it out. Through surrender to and immersion in this mystery we progress to the point of self-nullification.
Demirok is not asking us to pay attention to her as an autonomous, so-called individual being. Niether is she asking us to pay attention to the beginning, the end, or a bit part of any thing. She is asking us to simply pay attention. But not to a thing. After all, who would be paying attention, and to what—if we were, but for a moment, free of our habit of self-reference? Material objects such as Demirok’s seemingly ever-so-solid bronze sculptures, and yes even human beings, are the empty space that surrounds them.
Spirituality is fundamentally a cognitive issue. As Alan Brill once put it, “ We get what we get!”
