Overlapping Space, Time, and Identity
My works take shape through the enhancement of my journey by my research and become hybrid patterns of linguistic, technological, and social themes.As Nietzsche said, art is born through the dance of Apollo and Dionysus. This means that art was born of the unity of Apollo's analytical skill and intuition in Dionysus' dialect. It requires abstract knowledge, mathematical calculations, and skilled analysis just as much as it involves emotion, intuition, and inspiration. Art is turning an understanding, aphilosophical thought, into a shape or form, and we need many instruments and tools to form this pattern. I can also explain my belief in academics in this manner because if I were to understand how the people that came before me related to life and how and for what reasons they produced it, I could also find motives to leave the cocoon I live in.Because of these reasons, I have always placed great value on "knowing" and "wisdom." According to Immanuel Kant, "Science is organized knowledge, wisdom is organized life." The people of our time need to take cautious steps in how they will relate to science and technology, as science now resembles a mighty double-edged sword. While this sword hacks away illnesses, ignorance, and inequality with one edge to protect lives, it can also take lives with its opposite edge. Two important examples of this are the World Wars. During these disasters, people witnessed science's cold and destructive side and its practical side when science contributed to the revival and prosperity of humanity.Advancements that have been made in recent years have left the people of our time without "comment." Especially in recent years, advances in science, art, and technology happened unprecedentedly. When generally considered, these developments came about differently with time. They naturally moved in circles, and the hurricane of humanity trod the same paths repeatedly, constantly repeating the same rises, falls, and regressions. If we consider the possibility that history progresses in circular motions, all conditions will occur before their times. These continually arranged geometrical shapes andcircular repetitions, which I have come across in much of my research, constitute the basis for my series, which I have titled "zig zag time travelers."
Zig Zag Time Travelers and Circles
As widely known, a circle has no beginning and end. Looking at an occurrence circularly allows us to approach it from a 360-degree perspective. This means the simultaneous observance of the colors black, white, and gray. Being able to look circularly also means leaving behind our bodies, which are surrounded by the principal senses, which Einstein has proved the limitedness of, and looking at everything beyond our senses, like a bird's-eye view.In eastern languages, circle (mandala) means "a container that preserves energy" and helps increase holistic mindfulness. According to the Platonist and Neo-Platonist approaches, the Ideal Circle symbolizes wholeness, unity, eternity, and perfection.According to Quantum theory, atoms are circular in shape since all matter possesses the characteristics of particles and waves. They gradually divide into an infinitive number of smaller pieces.Schopenhauer, in his work titled Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, mentioned the infinite repetitions of particles in unlimited time. This endless repetition is also demonstrated in Plato's dialogue titled Timaeus, in which seven planets return to their exact starting points after one year of circularmovements. Bertrand Russel mentioned the return of the current state of the world to its starting point since its history occurs circularly.After Plato, several astrologists brought forward the notion that the history of the world could also be circular, like the circular movement of planets. At the beginning of every planet-year, the same people would be born again and share the same destiny, just like the arrival of a traveler who went on a world tour at his starting point after one year. At the end of such a tour, the traveler would say that the location he was at, at that point, was not the same place but that, on the contrary, every area he had traveled appeared to be the same place.As things stand, the division of the world into various parts and the drawing of imaginary borders, like east and west, must be one of humanity's collective habits. Because according to the political philosopher Leo Strauss, the human mind works by cauterizing universal things, objects, and phenomena into two opposites and failing to recognize and categorizing the common denominator between the two poles. However, according to Ortega Gasset, humans may one day say that these imaginary borders are unnecessary. Especially in recent times, the drifting of the poles and the breaking apart of some geographic entities are dragging us towards a new beginning. These pursuits after Modernism are threatening our stability. Zygmunt Bauman has also said that we are all walking on drifting sands. We are all drawing loops on top of a sandstorm that keeps changing direction and circling inside a tight circle.
Poetic establishments directed toward the modern human
Around 2006, in my tours through various existing energy centers in the world, where I traveled with "Ley Line Road," it was very surprising to come across the repetitive similarities of the adventure of humanity, which began in ancient times. Communication lines resembling the nervous system in the human body, like the world wide web, also existed in prehistoric times.I came across surprising similarities in examinations from various museums worldwide. Works of art from years stretching back to 17,000 BC, years when we thought no technological communication would have been possible, bore extraordinary resemblances to those from the Equator, India, and Asia. Similarly, the symbols in the Gobekli Tepe archaeological site had incredible likenesses to Mayan cosmology. Pyramids built with great scientific technologies in various parts of the world bore similar features. Moreover, monuments, sanctuaries, and obelisks belonging to ancient religions were placed on the same zig-zag patterns with detailed calculations. All of these indicated that significant advancements had been made in science and technology during various times in history. It could be a return to the starting points of ancient teachings, the basics of philosophy, and all disciplines that aimed to make the human complete.In 1616, Lu Giliio Vaninii took this notion further and claimed that Achilles would attack Troy again, reviving traditions, religions, and characters with no basis in reality. This way, the history of the world would renew itself, just like Heraclitus' flowing river discipline and Bauman's Law of Liquidity.Expanding and understanding these circle concepts are easily answerable, and disciplines countered once more. The life sciences of today are impossible to explain without anthropology and history. European countries have combined disciplines like biology, psychology, and sociology under biopsychosocial and have started teaching the fields of politics, philosophy, and economy as one central. People of our time, like in the understanding of the Renaissance, have found solutions to many problems with interdisciplinary approaches. Okay, but what is the issue?
Cyclical comments and the concept of nation
Strange questions of this sort have also occupied my mind from a very early age. I can mark my father's death in Tripoli under the Qaddafi regime as the starting point. I shared a joint pain with a group of people whose language, culture, and habits were very different from mine. This crisis had rendered us independent of time and place. Making art is becoming a way for me to mourn, not forget, and withdraw from the comfort of daily life. I had learned the meaning of, in the words of Susan Sontag, "regarding the pain of others" and even touching the pain of others. The first pictures I remember were of the mysterious carved rocks combined with the unmatched remains of the Roman Empire's architecture in Tripoli and the North African deserts.With this curiosity aroused, I moved to different places and organized trips to various lands. Earth is like a giant puzzle that can only be understood when looked at holistically. In fact, in my mind, German meteorologist Alfred Wegener's theory of "Continental Drift (Pangea)" presented us with the holisticpicture, in which none of the separations had happened, and the puzzle was complete.According to the scientists who saw that the eastern coasts of South America and the western coast of South Africa completed each other like a puzzle, there was one piece of land in the past. The granular and loose layers of the continents ripped away from their roots and separated due to natural disasters and the law of gravitation. According to the Pangea Theory, rocks swam and, even by the 1800s, the two shores of the Atlantic Ocean were united.To me, this resembled the partitioning of the world through maps and the granulation of organic wholeness within a whirlpool by the Modernism that started in the 17th century. It reached; the adventures of people who have been ripped away from their roots, living in modern cities where values clash; the destruction of daily life; the changing borders; and the changing concepts of place, time, and identity. Humankind is being gradually separated and changed by flowing rocks and, with time, becoming "homeless and vagrant." So, can people take their homelands with them?My homeland is Turkey(Anatolia), where the East and the West meet, which has been a host to the world's oldest civilizations. For hundreds of years, it acted as a home for migrant settlers and was used as a "tent." Home should not remain constant in one place; a man should be able to take it wherever he goes. Anatolia, which gets the name "Home of mothers" from the time when a mother fed all of the soldiers with one cup of "(yogurt drink)," is the land of people who are sharing brings joy, where the desire to let lifeprecedes the desire to live. And, for me, home is everywhere where one can form ties with another.Just as Mawlana Jalaluddin Rumi likens the compass to dervishes and the circles they draw as they dance, the needled side of the compass stays rooted while the other leg travels the world. While one leg is planted in the roots, the other traverses the globe, builds bridges between different cultures, and puts the world's puzzle together.Derrida's suggestion of "There is nothing outside of the text," which I love, is very interesting. Of course, not everything is a text, but Derrida said it this way to emphasize the importance of the readability of everything. In the year of 2016, in Rifted Valley, the first home of mankind located on the border of Kenya and Tanzania, I examined not only inscriptions, legends, and memorials but also rocks shaped by microorganisms, which are like notebooks that hold the long adventure of humankind, for those that know how to read it. The people who work with the memories held by rocks and waters today will one day open the door to the unknowns of history.