Reflections of the Time-Image, İlker Cihan Biner

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0. The Garden

Can Akgümüş’s exhibition “Swallowed” is a garden of

simulacra. A special chain links images in this garden

to one another. Expressive images linked by a chain,

however, do not comprise an entirety in motion. That

is to say, the images have not arisen as a result of an

integrated composition of motion-images. The motion

of the images in the works surface over time. Time

blankets and invigorates the images. This motion is

the time-image.

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1. The transformation of time-image as seen through

a crystal

In the garden of images created by time, time-images

linked by a special chain are the artist’s life experiences.

A crystalline intuition has left its traces on the experiences.

The artist draws a map of his predicaments

and escapes. The reflection of his predicaments and

escapes in the exhibition is thus made possible with

the occasional shifting of the time-image. The fiction

of the time-image is made readable through its foundation

in seeing.

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2. Seeing

Time is in the now. The doubling of now is time’s construct.

Now doubles as the past and the future. What

penetrates the ‘instant’ is the past and the future. The

pure gaze passing through the crystal creates a new

past and a new future within the now.

The ‘now’ is what emerges from the series ‘Treasures’.

Chains materializing next to the severed head of a

statue are the layers of a past coming into existence in

the now. This is the weight of past history, that is, the

membranous web of power relations.

In another one of the sequences in the Treasures Series,

we encounter a tree seen from the inside. Every

look at the tree seen from the inside gives rise to different

moods. At times traces of the past; at other

times, future states…the gaze that occurs in the now

transforms each time the image of the tree seen from

the inside. The reflections of the tree seen from the inside

are replaced by shadow as well as the suspended

image of a snake floating in the water.

Within the ‘Treasures Series’, the time-image thus focuses

on seeing. This series is the slipperiness of the

time that engenders the garden of images.

‘Parallel Universes’ is based on seeing as well. This

time, however, we are up against an imaginary landscape

far from the doubling of the now. What is the

visible in ‘Parallel Universes’ that creates the effect of

a mirror within composite photographs? The mirror

effect is not an allusion to narcissism.

It is the landscape of a fabricated idea made visible or

the unlimited destinations of the psyche.

‘Parallel Universes’ is the mirror effect of the destinations

the artist transverses.

Seeing is now directed at the ‘Same Sky’. In ‘Same Sky’,

seeing evolves towards escape. Every layer becomes a

completely different way of escaping.

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3. Reading

In this sequence, the time-image is readable. The desire

to see the unseen turns into the desire to read.

What bears upon ‘The Garden of Forgetting’ is first

and foremost a problem of memory. One’s combing

through of one’s memory and recollections now

serves the purpose of the reappearing past. Forgetting

defers to the creation of new spaces.

The artist focuses his attention on demolishing

neo-liberal architectural forms to open up new spaces.

Another work, however, involves the dynamism of

thought. In this instant time-image focuses on how

the now should be read. ‘The Garden of Forgetting’ is

not about the desire of seeing the now but of reading

the now.

The reading is an affectation not of reduction to verbal

meaning but of determining thought on the basis of

sentiment.

The ‘Wet Dream’ shared by two swallowed figures are

the power norms hiding in the body. The work titled

‘Wet Dreams’ is the weed in the garden of images.

Such that the time-image is the ‘instant’ that generates

sexuality. Bodies are at a dead-end. Inasmuch

that this work appears to be a weed in the garden of

images, it enables us to gaze into the darkness.

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4.Existence

The motion of Can Akgümüş’s time-images affects us

both quickly and over time. Each time-image is a reflection

of the artist’s existence.