Cansu Çakar

Cansu Çakar was born in Istanbul in 1988 and earned a bachelor's degree in the Traditional Turkish Arts Department at Dokuz Eylül University of Fine Arts. Her work is about blending traditional art forms, such as illumination design and miniature painting, with contemporary art practices and topics. By doing so, she challenges the stereotypical classification of traditional expressions and highlights her desire to set them free. In her drawings, paintings, and workshops, she delves into male-dominated subjects through her unique personal investigation and storytelling, which typically center on social, historical, and architectural topics, including expected roles for women, as well as historical and contemporary interpretations of Near Eastern and Mediterranean cultures. Her works create a symbolic dialogue that hints at the seeming contradiction and continuity of traditions in today's world. Believing that a symbolic language never dies but instead changes forms and survives within the confines of commonly approved norms, she aims to recreate an old visual language that's often considered dead by intervening forces of the living. As such, she redefines the traditional format of miniature in her artistic practice, even while working in long-established styles herself. The artist's interest in the tradition of collective thinking and production is central to her work and informs her practice through her workshops. During these activities, she draws a line between what it means to be a woman or a prisoner in an oppressive society and the aesthetics of traditional art in our contemporary art world. Ultimately, both share the search for a pluralistic language against conservatism and the need for emancipation.

Hazbahçe

In her work titled Hazbahçe, produced at SAHA Studio, Cansu Çakar interprets different types of public spaces featuring landscape design, from the recreation areas of the 18^th century to today’s ‘nation’s garden’s, not only on the basis of historical depictions but also through concepts such as fear and pleasure. This work draws on written records on both past and present everyday life experiences, from oral sources and contemporary observations, focusing on a series of fictional garden depictions and a public intervention. Derived from the word hasbahçe, a term describing the royal gardens of the Ottoman Empire, the title Hazbahçe [‘Pleasuregarden’] picks its fruit from an erotic communication network that triggers fear in public space.

The word used as bahçe in Turkish (bāġçe, باغچه ) means small orchard, or vineyard in Persian. It is where grapevines are grown, and wine finds its source – a place where pleasure comes to be, in a sense. The meeting with pleasure is the moment when the body will observe its own thoughts, and in this conceptual garden (hazbahçe), the body rejects the limitations the mind imposes on desires, and creates its own thoughts. It embraces the erotic; it does not exclude or fetishize it. After all, “...it is intermittence, as psychoanalysis has so rightly stated, which is so erotic: the intermittence of skin flashing between two articles of clothing (trousers and sweater), between two edges (the open-necked shirt, the glove and the sleeve); it is this flash itself which seduces, or rather: the staging of an appearance-as-disappearance.”[1]

The concept of intermittence appears in the artist’s work titled Nakkaştepe, produced as part of the series titled Hazbahçe. Baba Nakkaş, also the founder of the earliest Naqshbandi convents in Istanbul, pioneered the founding of the first miniature workshop at the Ottoman palace during the reign of Mehmed II. Today, the steep street leading down from the Nakkaştepe Nation’s Garden to Kuzguncuk is named Babanakkaş Street, and this steep slope that leads to the shore, delineated with high walls on both sides, is the intermittent, seductive space.

The public space intervention titled Yıldız, which Çakar has produced as part of the same series, examines a certain period by twisting the concept of intermittence that emerges in Nakkaştepe towards a direction where ends converge. The work deals with names of lovers engraved onto outdoor tables placed at picnic sites, seeking to record, using its own method, the memories concealed in these engraved names. It remembers the names, to use the old idiom, of “adventurous street and meadow girls” by adding an engraved plank to a randomly selected table in Yıldız Grove.

Hazbahçe attempts to depict the garden as a socially inclusive area that is not necessarily regular or controlled. It connects to the process of the garden opening from a walled-in area to an open area, and from the private to the public via sex and sexuality. Openness, permeability, limitlessness, vitality, and erotic ties, conceived in relation to the garden, find expression in the works titled Night and Day.

[1] Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, translated by Richard Miller, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975, p.10