Untitled Untitled

Candeğer Furtun employs traditional ceramic techniques in order to examine and portray the human body. She often works with reproductions of individual body parts, which are then combined so that an individual fragment can represent the whole, or suggest a larger scene, history, idea or space. Having studied arts and crafts both at home and abroad in the 1950s and 1960s, her eye towards her own culture is of an insider as well as an outsider.

Furtun’s Untitled (1994–1998) series of ceramics shows nine bare human legs placed side by side and installed on a bench-like construction. Recalling mannequin legs, the disembodied limbs are male, if hairless, and one pair is touched by a hand. Suggesting a number of bodies in a row, the work references the hammam culture of Turkey, in which people sit on benches in a space of healing and rest. Yet it might also recall the seating of people on public transport, in waiting rooms, or other public-private spaces. Or perhaps this group of exclusively masculine ‘manspreading’ limbs quietly addresses the furtive conditions and exclusionary tactics of male power: the coming together of men in order to negotiate or sign deals behind closed doors.

While the leg is the means of mobility for the body, here it is immobilised; while the hand is a site of expression, of use and of touch, here it is without function. Through this abstraction, Furtun’s works contrast the individuality of human bodies with their representation, pointing to notions of artifice and seriality.

Despite the intensive physical labour that goes into the production of these ceramics – made by casting and throwing – they are inherently ones of reproduction and sequence. Conversely, the works pay respect to the human form, which although subjugated to the forces of serialisation and homogenisation, remains particular, gendered and unique.