Burcu Yağcıoğlu

Burcu Yağcıoğlu was born in Istanbul in 1981. She studied BA in painting at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University and MA in Visual Arts and Visual Communication Design at Sabanci University. In 2008 she moved to London to study MFA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths Collage. She moved back to Istanbul in 2016 where she currently lives and works. Yağcıoğlu’s practice encompasses drawing, video, collage, and installation. Her works often initiates from her investigations on biological processes. In her practice, biology both as a historical discourse and a natural science is conveyed as an imaginative and speculative source to decipher the Anthropocentric hierarchies. Yağcıoğlu treats fields such as biotechnology, botany, zoology, and culinary arts which locates other species within human cultures with a science fictional approach. Collage holds a crucial place both as a conceptual method and as a practical tool in her practice. Yağcıoğlu uses collage to articulate found images to her drawings, scientific knowledge to speculation, and materials to concepts.

Dear Lethargy
Dear Lethargy, developed at SAHA studio is a multilayered project that is shaped by the concepts of inertia and stopping. The project, which consists of a series of multi- medium works, is engaged in fields such as psychoanalysis, physics, biology, science fiction and mythology. In our current reality in which the planet is heading towards its destruction due to human’s relentless movements, the project generates thoughts and speculations on stopping and inertia as radical ways of existence.

From the perspective of thermodynamics, the science of heat and motion, bacterias, whales, giant leaf lilies, hurricanes, stock markets, luxury cruise ships, nation states, and whirlpools, all do the same thing; through motions, processes, and fluxes they consume the gradients around them and eventually stop. Heat, pressure and chemical gradients or differences, which are the basis of all motion in the known universe, are always desired to be eliminated by nature. When the difference is removed, everything stops. All movements are for stopping at the end. That is why, paradoxically, in the universe of thermodynamics, which is ruled by disorganization and chaos, the longer you stand still, the longer you sustain. All known living beings live by the Red Queen hypothesis: it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. Living beings have to constantly run their metabolic processes and evolve in order to maintain their place in the ecosystem. But the opposite is equally true; it takes all the stopping to keep on running. Constant movement and change mean a fast burn out for both living and non-living processes, thus stopping is essential for ongoingness.

Departing from this discourse of energy flow, the project bridges Aergia’, Goddess of idleness’s eternal rest, the fantastic perpetual motion machines that promise power and endless movement in Faustian proportions, inert underground carbon deposits, and the oral / aboral rhetoric as organs that take energy and expel entropy, to each other both aesthetically and theoretically.

Burcu Yağcıoğlu's speech within the scope of WWN Talks: