Follower Follower

Burçak Bingöl reproduces ordinary materials or objects using ceramic and ornamental patterns. Her glazing techniques, floral designs and motifs, common to the Islamic world, were prevalent in the Ottoman period. Thus her works are investigations of Turkish cultural history and its legacy, as seen in relationship to historical crafts, symbols and visual motifs –though placed within a contemporary context.

For the Biennial, Bingöl has created a series of works responding to today’s Istanbul, the global culture of surveillance, as well as to the tradition of ceramics and crafts. Works in the series Follower are experiments in dissemblance and stealth, in which tradition becomes a means of camouflage or disguise. Having observed that in the Tarlabasi neighborhood of Istanbul there was an increasing number of surveillance cameras, Bingöl covered a number of them with a ceramic pattern of flowers and garlands and placed them on the exteriors of buildings. The implicit weaponry of the surveillance camera is neutralised by the imagery of flowers, becoming fragile and even beautiful, and the decoration incorporates plants from the Beyoglu area of Istanbul, which is symbolic as a site of resistance. Bingöl’s cameras track not only the spectator, inverting the relationship between viewer and viewed, but also the memory of public, social and environmental spaces. Even though its appearance is rapidly changing, Istanbul owes much to the historical legacy of craft. Bingöl’s work can be seen as an ode to these traditional techniques as well as a way of resisting or negating the technologies that are set against them in contemporary contexts.