Interstices, a dizzying array of combinations

Since he moved to Beirut in 2015, Barış Doğrusöz has been producing a visual lexicon by encoding specific types of architecture. The artist has collected an inventory of military artefacts called “pillboxes”, concrete guard-posts situated around sensitive institutional, military, and private buildings alongside roads, bridges, borders, and contested territories. These structures are often camouflaged to conceal their locations and to maximize the element of surprise. They may be part of a trench system and form an interlocking line of defence. Observing the ubiquity of these artefacts, the artist approaches them as though they are “extropic masks”: in other words, as optical devices that remain open, that never close, and that strictly obey military logic. He has undertaken a process of indexing the loopholes in these structures, known in military architecture as “embrasures.” Whether in Lebanon, Syria, or Palestine, embrasures incarnate the physical representation of territorial limits as well as the controlling presence of a volatile force. Through these three-dimensional wireframe structures, Doğrusöz composes complex abstract partitions out of the constantly shifting geopolitical situations of the present. The wireframe structures project a shadow play of geometrical vectors that cannot be held, caught, or trusted. These shadows evoke the process of movement involved in writing, introducing something vital to the mechanisms of meaning by using the intangible to signify a tangible presence. Doğrusöz explains that the “piece works towards deciphering the loopholes’ physical presence as everlasting spatial data in a game of prequels and premonitions.”

"What Time Is It?", exhibition view, Arter, 2019.

Photo: FluFoto