DEVİR - TESLİM

A performative installation work held as an intervention to The Hague carpet store De Perzen in January 2022.

(in some terms) 

A piled up spread around close to heart playtime attempt to honor and release my childhood spent in carpet stores.

(in my terms)

                
                             
                            

I never told anyone this but the morning of Friday the 28th I went to De Perzen somewhat as a performer.
I would place and install and reinstall printed pages of poems, writings, photographs, archival objects, hand-sewn fabrics and rolls of paper around the carpet store,
one that inevitably resembles to, but is smaller than the one I grew up in as a child.
During two hours I would lift up, spread out, separate and pile up carpets and kilims.
I would, in a way, mimic the movements of how a shopkeeper finds their way around a carpet store.
I would then achieve sculptural, static images that intervene and play with the material and the visual reality of carpet beds and rolls that come as a given.
I would ask for the visitors to come smell the carpets, to smell the store as a totality.
I would repeatedly do the heavy lifting on-site, like my father and my grandfather did to make a living.
I would draw the audience in my own references and memories with knots and threads.
I would perhaps surprise the daily customer with additional things to see and read in between these woven trade objects.
I would screen the short film I made against a wall, and make everyone sit on a carpet bed to watch it.
And with that I would remember the times I was scolded in our living room, looking down, only to see that there was always a carpet on the floor, in which I would loose myself, and that of which I would memorize the patterns in shame as a kid. 
I would present my piled up words and let them dangle from the sides with the tassels.
I would release the knots down my throat, those that have been sitting there for three generations, by sometimes talking about what I was doing, and explaining who the person is in that photograph.
I would let the shop owners tell their own story and briefly connect with my intimate crowd of visitors.
I would find myself in my playground.
I would find myself in a funeral house.
I would find myself reclaiming a territory that once belonged to my family, marked by pain and sorrow, and make it mine.
I would find myself in a hand-over,
a take-over,
and see out from there what comes.

And so it was. That’s how it happened.  

In the end we held conversations drinking tea together.
I hereby thank Jamshid and Nuri for their trust in opening their doors to us and for providing the space this work needed.

KNOTS DOWN MY THROAT
                  OR SHAME IN PATTERNS 
                                OR WHERE TO PUT ALL THE SORROW

    

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