Burak Delier

Burak Delier (b. 1977, Adapazarı) lives and works in İstanbul. Currently working as an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture at Sakarya University, Delier’s essays discussing the relationship between art and politics were published by Koç University Press under the title Scenarios of the Art World (2016).

Producing in multiple formats, the artist carries out collective projects such as Barmagazine: The Magazine That Thinks It’s a Bar (in collaboration with Eylem Akçay, Emre Tansu Keten and Taylan Kesanbilici, 2018) along with his solo exhibitions such as 'The Small Room of History' (Karşı Sanat, 2022), ‘Free Society of Fools and Crooks’ (Pilot Gallery, Istanbul, 2016), ‘Play Your Part and The Script Will Follow’ (Pilot Gallery, Istanbul, 2013), ‘Freedom Has No Script’ (Iniva, London, 2014) and ‘The Collector’s Wish’ (Pilot Gallery, Istanbul, 2012). Among the group exhibitions he has participated in, it is possible to mention: ‘Istanbul. Passion, Joy, Fury’ (MAXXI Museum, Rome, 2015), ‘Artists’ Film International’, (Istanbul Modern, Istanbul, 2015 and Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2014), ‘Unrest of Form’ (Vienna, 2013), the 2010 and 2008 Taipei Biennials,  the 10th Istanbul Biennial (2007). 

Interested in rendering visible the relationships between capitalism and contemporary art practices in his collective and individual work, Delier turns life itself into an object of study by creating absurd intersections using guerrilla tactics and strategies borrowed from everyday life. Furthering his studies with an approach that problematizes both himself and art, the artist seeks to create breathing spaces beyond existing relations of production and power, as alternatives to the dominant living culture, which is one that narrows life to the point of suffocation.

THEY WILL EITHER HOPE OR FEAR #3 & K P T N Agency (2006)

How can we think of art history differently – without either exaggerating the impact of material structure or inflating the rote learning of art discourse? How do we make the realized works of art and their multiple agents (artists, galleries, the market, institutions, environments, support structures, material possibilities, etc.) questionable and make other, impossible possibilities and possibilities that have been rendered impossible heard and seen? Can we look to the forces of the fake, fiction, fabulation and mythologizing to imagine a new people against the relentless forces of concrete, material and social reality, of which the art environment is a part? I think yes, we can. Especially in my work since 2016, I have been trying to feed on the vital force of fiction that belittles reality, at a time when Turkey and the art world are increasingly closed, timid, conservative and lacking in initiative.

The video-narrative titled THEY WILL EITHER HOPE OR FEAR #3 is based on the exhibition I visited in 2008, realised by a group of artists who were fans of the famous fraudster of the 90s, Selçuk Parsadan, and claimed that he was "the artist of performances that have material and concrete effects in the material and concrete world." Parsadan was one of the masters of telephone fraud, known as "Helloism" in fraudster jargon. Based on this input, the work explores the possibilities of sound, technical devices and the art of storytelling (like many con artists, Parsadan is a master storyteller). While investigating these possibilities, a series of ethico-aesthetic decisions were made, driven by possibilities that were lost, destroyed or ignored, or that could not be realized. Ignoring the loss of the lost, as if these losses could be replaced immediately, I refrained from realizing them materially, that is, producing this exhibition and the works as concrete objects. Instead, a witness narrative of questionable authenticity was presented, and a method that did not ignore absence was followed in an empty gallery, using the descriptive capacities of words and gestures, and the ambiguous signalling capacities of sound and image. The method arising from these ethico-aesthetic concerns has enabled the emergence of a series of pure artistic potentials with which we can turn the disaster we are in into a life force against the world-historical situation. Remembering, which includes forgetting, is a highly complex, living process in which the present moment feels its weight on the past, and which involves history and the personal and social unconscious.

K P T N Agency (2006) [2023] overlaps Altan Gürman's famous Kapitone (Padded Panel) (1976) work with Selçuk Parsadan's agency called The Turkish Press Agency, from which he ran his scams. Gürman's graphic language and elements become the sign of an agency that describes works of art over the phone. Of course, with strange, uncanny, unexpected transformations. This sign is the sign of an agency that carries out exhibition narratives over the phone, founded by the lost artist group that are fans of Selçuk Parsadan, as I mentioned above. The artists sometimes give appointments and times, sometimes call random numbers, and describe exhibitions or individual works of art. We can imagine a group or individual version of the audiobook format of old radio dramas or podcasts today, applied to the plastic arts; but with one difference: the works described exist only as narrative. The Gürman reference emerged unintentionally as a result of the strange resonances of Turkey, history, and our visual culture. While I was trying to imagine the sign of the hypothetical agency of the lost artists who are fans of Parsadan, I realized that what I was working on (a logo consisting of a table, a phone, a man with a split Mercedes head as an authority figure from the Susurluk Crash[1]) looked remarkably similar to Gürman's famous work Kapitone. This coincidence, as well as causing the man's head to fly off, also indicated that an artist who could be the continuation of Gürman's artistic language could be included in this lost group of artists. The word "kapitone" comes from the Latin root "caput" which means “head”, or “chief”, as in the word "capital" (capital sum/capital city), and is also used by Lacan ("point de capiton") in meanings such as “reference”, “anchor” or “buttoning place” (fixed signifying point where the signifier and the signified are interwoven). When I learned that it was used with these meanings, and then associated it with the term "noesis" in philosophy, which is neither sensual nor discursive, but intuitive and primordial, indicating a pure act of thinking, the name and motto of the agency emerged: K P T N: Tele-Narratives for a New Noesis.

Translation: Sibel Subaşı Hill & David Hill

[1]The Susurluk Crash in 1996 was a major event in the uncovering of Turkey's deep state. 3 passengers in the car - a senior police officer, a beauty queen, and a former extreme right-wing militant wanted by the police for multiple murders and drug trafficking - were killed, and one - a member of parliament - was seriously injured. The crash victims' unusual relationships and their links with the Interior Minister resulted in numerous investigations, including one conducted by the parliament.