Zilan Turgut, one of the participants of our Memory and Youth project, spoke with artist Meltem Şahin to develop content for the Memorial Counter: Digital Memorial for Women Who Died from Violence on the Memorialize Turkey website. The Memorial Counter is a digital monument created by Zeren Göktan for women killed by male violence in Turkey. Aslı Serin and Birhan Keskin wrote a poem titled together Memorial Counter (Anıt Sayaç) in 2013, and published it on 160incekilometre.com. They then published a book of the same name, illustrated by Meltem Şahin, in April 2021, which was 160incekilometre’s 100th book. After the publication of the book, the exhibition One’s Pain Does Not Pass to Another inspired by this production was exhibited at the Kıraathane Istanbul Literature House from June 25 to August 6, 2021. Meltem Şahin, who curated the exhibition, explained of her motivation: “These stories are being erased from our language, our minds, and our hearts every day and they disappear. Just like Zeren Göktan’s Memorial Counter, this exhibition is an effort not to forget, to remember and to reveal what has happened.”
If we were to consider Birhan Keskin and Aslı Serin’s poem to be the first stone laid for the foundation of the Memorial Counter, we could say that the name of your exhibition is a continuation of it. Could you tell us about your motivation and purpose that led you to the idea for the exhibition?
Zeren Göktan’s Memorial Counter is a digital memorial for murdered women. Birhan Keskin and Aslı Serin’s poem is very powerful and it inspired us to draw attention to femicide and violence. My dear poet friend Elvin Eroğlu sent me the poem and asked me to illustrate it. I didn’t want to draw within my comfort zone as I had done for others—I wanted to press myself, force myself, and depict the emotional intensity Birhan and Aslı’s verse. As a result, two approximately three-hour performances emerged as part of the “Stay LIVE at Home!” series in cooperation with Perform Istanbul. I broadcast the performance on two channels, one in wide view via Zoom and one in close-up on Instagram. I drew as I repeatedly listened to Birhan and Aslı recite their poem during the performances. I deliberately didn’t plan the drawings in advance because I wanted to draw them as I felt at that moment in the performance. I used a printing technique called monoprint from the drawings. I think the sharpness of the poem and the sensitivity and naivety that come from the illustration’s monoprint nature complement each other very well. Then, as Elvin and I had planned, we turned the drawings that emerged from the poem and performance into a book. So, Memorial Counter turned from a poem into a performance and then from there into a book, and we had no intention of leaving it there. As the project grew, it became more meaningful to us, so we decided to hold an exhibition. Birhan and Aslı’s poem is so powerful that it became a slogan at women’s marches. It was so powerful that we couldn’t finish the project after just one output, and so we turned it into a more holistic collection of projects that included different branches of the arts.
The short time between the deaths of two women on the Memorial Counter doesn’t even allow time to mourn. This came to mind when I saw the title of the exhibition. Could you talk about the reason why you chose this name specifically and the connotation it holds for you?
Elvin Eroğlu chose three examples from the poem for the title of the exhibition and together we decided on the name One’s Pain Does Not Pass To Another. We see violence against women, LGBTQI+ individuals, people of different ethnic origins and animals every day in Turkey. As you mentioned, the lack of time to mourn, being surprised at being upset, being unresponsive, trying to protect our mental health and somehow continuing our lives are things we all experience living in this country. These stories are being erased from conversation, from our minds, from our hearts, and are disappearing every day. Just like Zeren Göktan’s Memorial Counter, this exhibition is an effort to not forget, to remember and reveal these experiences.
Your exhibition consists of four connected rooms, each with different techniques and materials. Could you tell us about the rooms, the materials used in the rooms and the production methods? Could you also mention the points you wanted to convey or emphasize with these different production techniques and materials?
As you said, the exhibition consists of four different rooms that are related to each other. The first room, called “Double Embodiment” (“Çift Bedenleme”), contains performance videos shot in close-up and from afar, an installation of the performance and poem. The room right next to it is “Transcendental Hoop” (“Deneyüstü Çemberi”). This room is where the monoprints are exhibited. I had a transcendental experience during the performances by encircling myself in a ring of verse and listening over and over to the voices of the poets as well as with the naïve and calm nature of the monoprint technique. When I was designing this room, my aim was to create a similar experience for the viewers. The audience takes in the pieces by entering a hoop containing the printing blocks I used and the verses corresponding to the monoprints. While the performance creation hoop in the first room where the performances are exhibited is experienced from the outside in a more museum-like way, the hoop in the second room is experienced from the inside.
The third room, “Traces of Murder on the Tongue,” is a presentation of Elvin’s archival work on femicides along with the foreword from Austrian poet Heimrad Bäcker’s book, nachschrift (transcript). A bit more independent than poetry and books, here we make our way around the topic of femicide and exhibit the most blood-curdling statements made by the perpetrators, presented without commentary as much as we could. What they say surrounds the visitors when they enter the room due to the design and they leave deeply affected, once again engraving in the mind the pain of the unceasing murder of women in this country.
The final room is “To Imprint,” that is, to make an effect and an event permanent and powerful, to place it in one’s mind and consciousness, to engrave it. I sewed the photographs of 12 women in the book who were murdered and whose cases are still ongoing onto abstract, monoprint figural silhouettes on fabric I made during the performance. The purpose of calling this room “To Imprint” was that in addition to the technique I used, we actually wanted to imprint these women in people’s minds. It was our memorial room. The gray, transparent fabrics on which I sewed the photographs on the chests of the silhouettes of different bodies I drew on them present the images of these 12 women. The roots of each flower stretch all the way to the ground, but none of them seem to take root, and the pain of one doesn’t pass to the other. This room is a feminine room for me. Here, behind the fluttering tulle on the open windows, we see the ivy outside the panes, which reminds us of being earth, of our feminine side.
There are 12 silhouettes in the room and each silhouette has a photograph attached to it. Is there a reason you chose these 12 specifically?
These 12 women in my installation are also in the book. We selected 12 women after a very difficult process under Elvin’s guidance. Most of the women we selected were women whose cases are still pending because we wanted to draw attention to their cases. We also tried to be as inclusive as possible by including women from different ethnicities, age groups, social classes and sexual identities. Among these 12 women are 9-year-old Ceylan Aslan, who was beaten to death by her father, who had previously been imprisoned for slitting his ex-wife’s throat and was released after the law on the execution of sentences was enacted. There is also LGBTQI+ rights defender Hande Kader, who was murdered in a trans hate crime.
When it comes to femicides, we often read beautiful praise of the “victim” in the media. Contrary to this, femicides are exhibited in their nakedness in the Memorial Counter, while women’s anger and sound of their footsteps are present in the poem. It can be said that a similar situation exists in your exhibition as well. The statements from the perpetrators and the bodies of the murdered women are displayed unmediated and in the open. What do you think about the importance and necessity of such work?
The poem Monument Counter ends with Birhan’s lines: “Firearms in our hands, Uma’s sword at our waist / Dexterous in the arts of defense and fighting / Enough already, enough, let’s climb from the mortise.” These words impress me every time I read them and fuel the fire inside me. I was subjected to physical and psychological violence by my partner at that time when I was at university 10 years ago. It took me years to come to terms with it and begin to talk about it. I think it’s really valuable to tell and share these experiences. I also hope that these posts can open a space for individuals who are subjected to different types of violence to feel that they aren’t alone and so that they share their experiences and feelings.
As you said, our aim with this exhibition was to reveal these pains in the most open and unmediated way, without embellishing the victims. In the last room, we come face to face with the photographs of murdered women sewn on silhouettes of bodies, without being censored, unlike what we see in newspapers. The same openness applies to the room with the perpetrators’ statements. With the exhibition, we wanted to create the awareness that I gained from my own personal experiences and a free space of sharing to counter the violence we see in society. We wanted to emphasize and reveal the importance of standing together, of supporting each other, of organizing and speaking out against the system that glorifies and protects perpetrators and portrays women as victims.
A quote from Heimrad Bäcker is at the entrance of the room where the statements of the perpetrators are on the wall: “It’s sufficient to quote the language of the perpetrators and victims … to be the language preserved in documents.” What do you make of it? What is the purpose of this phrase specifically in the room containing what the perpetrators said?
In the preface to his book, itself considered a masterpiece of concrete poetry, Austrian poet Heimrad Bäcker points to the language used by the perpetrators of war and totalitarianism to understand the Holocaust, the greatest crime of the 20th century. In this room, Elvin Eroğlu drew attention with this quote in the simplest way possible to the naked reality of femicide in both the spoken and written words of the perpetrators and their horrifying minds. These words that surround visitors when they enter the room, in terms of the design, once again bring to mind the pain of unending femicide and deeply touched the visitors. Some of the shocking quotes on the walls include ones such as: “I beat her every day, so I don’t understand why she died this time,” and “I thought she was a woman. When I saw that she was a transexual, I killed her,” and “I restored my honor, my honor. She cheated on me.”
What would you say about the effect of the exhibition on people during and after visiting?
While preparing for the book and the exhibition, unlike the performance, I realized that I always suppressed my emotions. While I wanted to carry the emotional intensity and pressure I experienced in the performance to the book and exhibition, I alienated myself a little in order to protect my own mental health. I tried to isolate myself from the subject by watching comedy series when I was sewing on the photographs of the murdered women. The exhibition setup process, on the other hand, was more mechanistic. I did together with the exhibition designer and it proceeded totally systematically. The end of this alienated emotional state came with the opening day of the exhibition. A young woman started to cry at the opening. I had been explaining the exhibition to other visitors when I saw her crying and then I started to cry. Then the other people at the exhibition started to cry too. The experience showed me that although we created the exhibition through a logical process, it held great power and it impressed me both as a person and as an artist. It also made me realize how difficult it is for health professionals, journalists, politicians, lawyers, educators—those who actively work with violence against and harassment of women—to keep up their mental health and stay in a healthy place. I think we need to continue this work and organizing without slowing down and with new participants from time to time.
The Pain of One Doesn't Bleed into the Other was curated by Meltem Şahin and Elvin Eroğlu, designed by Evrim Karacan and with sound design by Mert Kocadayı. The exhibition opened at the Kıraathane Istanbul Literature House and ran from June 25 to August 6, 2021.
