Beuys Underground

Overview

In a practice spanning some 40 years, İnci Eviner has explored the perspective of women, processes of organisation and the formation of subjectivities. Her works imagine alternate forms of expression and existence that interrogate normative representation. In SB13, she presents two videos that reflect on art, politics and life.

Eviner’s Runaway Girls (2015) draws inspiration from young women who have run away from home. Shot in an unused warehouse, the film is an exploration of absurdity and opacity; the viewer is uncertain about the gender and identity of the figures, who is chasing whom, the sequence of the events or whether these depictions are drawn from fiction or reality. The performers’ faces are obscured by large drawings that become protagonists in the unfolding commotion, in which even the drawings demand to be freed from the restraints of the paper.

For her SB13 commission, Beuys Underground (2017), Eviner’s video carves out an alternative present tense world, in which an oppressive and failing government creates fictionalised enemies to cover up its failures. As the past and the future become unavailable as reference points for contemporary consciousness, a group of poets and artists must go underground. Drawing foresight from Joseph Beuys, known for his vision as an artist and healer, they set their minds to developing a total recalibration of their visual and verbal order. The group decides that the following terms must be defined immediately: justice, laughter, cloud, headscarf, family, woman, drum, soldier, nurse, death, sculpture, separation, jealousy, hearing, mosque, Atatürk Cultural Centre, Persian vase, love and cypress tree.


This project was part of Sharjah Biennial 13.