Cables, Keys, Glasses, Lights Cables, Keys, Glasses, Lights

The works of Henrik Olesen examine the politics of the repressed, the unseen, the hidden, the private and the excluded. Through the use of simple materials, such as collages and printouts, or the laying out of individual possessions on a wall, he explores the trappings of individual identity with a particular attunement to the history of homosexuality.

Olesen’s series of installations and ghostly collages for the Istanbul Biennial focus on the figure of the ‘dirty neighbour’ and the capacity of neighbourhoods to become sites of voyeurism, distrust, fetishism or the uncanny. The work responds to the fact that ‘neighbours’ (in many different senses) have the potential to frighten us as well as befriend us. Because we rely on those around us to respect us and our boundaries, our fears that they may not do so can make neighbourhoods places of hostility and even danger. There is also a voyeuristic aspect to neighbourly life, as we gaze at and are gazed upon by one another in private moments, either inadvertently or as a ‘peeping Tom’ – a neibourhood archetype notably explored in Alain Robbe-Grillet’s The Voyeur.

Olesen’s work for the Istanbul Biennial reflects on the collision between sexual fantasy, voyeurism and shared life. In a site-specific installation at the Galata Greek School, he is showing a series of abstract collages that respond in an associative manner to questions of viewership, intimacy and transgression, while in their abject inchoateness they resonate with Georges Bataille’s notion of the informe (the ‘formless’) as well as with the work of Turkish abstract painters such as Adnan Çoker and Fahrelnissa Zeid. The collages are produced through a method of layering on transparent plastics and mirrored backgrounds, creating abstractions of architectural and spatial details, such as holes, keys, eyeglasses and cables. They raise questions surrounding the ethics and technologies of watching or being watched, social proximity and distance, and the nebulous realities of uncertainty or even sexual fantasy experienced within the random, sometimes uncanny relationships into which we enter as a result of coexistence.