İhsan Oturmak, a young artist who creates his world of paintings with themes from Anatolian multiculturalism, militarism, education and punishment, opened his first personal exhibition "Three Flawed Operations: Tribe, School, Civilization" in Depo- Istanbul last month. We have talked with Oturmak about his exhibition, the relation of the "powerful" with "school" and what kind of "civilization" is being built on this...
What is the starting point for Three Flawed Operations: Tribe, School, Civilization?
İhsan Oturmak: First of all, I was curious about myself and my position in society. When I started to think about these things, especially when I was studying at the university, I was witness to transformations that the people from Anatolia were undergoing. They are confronted with quite a different culture when they first come to Istanbul. I was trying to make sense of the transformation they experienced in the course of adapting to this culture. The person wants to get camouflaged in order to escape from the attention in this new place with a new culture. Pretending to be somone else allows her to escape attention; therefore she can take on a new identity by making herself accepted as such. After a while I felt like I needed to explore my questions further. While I was examining this process, I thought this might have something to do with childhood. People are first motivated to change at an early age, although it becomes evident only as they grow older. I tried to reflect back upon the past in regard to my own life, and reached the conclusion that such a transformation might possibly be related with primary school education. Then I started to explore primary schools.
How did these ideas initially reveal themselves in your paintings?
There is a parallell between what I think, feel and live and the works I create. And this is precisely what I try to do, although sometimes I only realize the implications if it after a while. When I happen to be in a city I just live the athmosphere of the city but I don’t realize the influence it has on me. I need to have a look at it from another city at another time in order to grasp the athmosphere there. I was in a routine in the place where I was living. I was unaware of what I was living. Once I moved from the region, once it became a long time ago, only then was I able to grasp the situation I had been in at the time. As the setting changed, I started to remember how I had spent time with my family and to think about my old neighborhood. I started to remember my friends, the school I used to skip, the classes I had, the children I had quarrels with; indeed, I started to remember everything. That is how I came to develope a curiosity for the past. Once I developed this curiosity, I have seen its unavoidable influence in my works.
You are from Diyarbakır. What was Diyarbakır like when you were in your formative years at school?
I started school three times in my life. First, I started the school like every other child when I reached school-age. But that year the school was shut down indefinitely for political reasons. I ended up leaving. I am talking about the 1990s. We moved to the Benusen neighborhood in Diyarbakır. This time, after starting school at 15 I decided I didn’t want to attend anymore and dropped out. Later on, at the persistent request of my family, I re-enrolled and did not quit until I had completed my university education. When I started the first grade in primary school I was almost 10 years old. When I graduated to third grade in primary school my peers had started to wear a new school uniform because they had started secondary school. I started to develop a fear of the primary school uniform as a result. When I graduated to middle school, they were already high school students.
How did you discover your talent for painting amid all that turmoil?
I did not discover it; I had always drawn pictures. It was the simplest way to express myself. I have been drawing pictures ever since I could remember whenever I could find a pencil and a piece of paper.
How did your teachers realized your talent?
I had a painting teacher when I was in secondary school. He also worked on his paintings at home, and then he would usually bring his oil paintings to the school to complete them together with the students. I become acquainted with oil painting thanks to his first recommendations regarding the material. My first painting was a view from a snowy farm. It was the first time when I realized I could use paint. It fueled my passion for learning about painting. I was not a lazy student. On the contrary, I was successful at school. But as soon as I found out there was a fine arts high school in Diyarbakır, somehow I ended up there.
Studying at the High School of Fine Arts is quite different. It is a school which is not integrated into the rest of Diyarbakır. Other schools have the atmosphere of a subculture that is different from the political atmosphere in Diyarbakır. The background to that subculture is constituted by those who migrated from rural areas to the city. This subculture has an influence on the life and education there. But the everyday life is determined pretty much by the political atmosphere. Of course it is common to see the people from the majority society, but the High School of Fine Arts is a more sophisticated school when you compare it to others. After all, most of the students are not natives of the city; they are mostly children of teachers or of military families. It is quite something in Diyarbakır to have a school where you can hear the piano. Everything is beautiful, music, painting... But it is quite a long way from the reality in Diyarbakır. It was really fascinating when I first started there. I was aware that I was getting to know a different culture. I knew I liked painting. I wanted to learn how to paint;I wanted it with all my heart and soul. I also looked at painting as a way to escape from life. I was starting to open a door and find a way for myself before I even knew it.
Turkish is not a language of emotion for you, and art is a field where emotions prevail. How this split in emotions reflected in your paintings?
Painting has no language; it has no religion or faith. It is simply about your way of perceiving the visual world. After all, I am not the kind of person who can express himself verbally, but I realized that I could express myself visually. I speak Turkish with an accent; I can not speak Kurdish very well, either. Painting is now the language I can speak best.
Among important elements that compose Three Flawed Operations are the photographs you have collected, right?
My curiosity about past prompted me, in time, to get interested in photographs. I started to get to know people through photographs. How did people live? In what ways did they continue their existence in society? At first, I did not pay attention to the notes written behind the photographs but in time they also became a part of the work. I was collecting photographs of ordinary people from everywhere. A photograph from 1940s, for instance, Fatma, an Armenian girl.... I was interested in photographs of children taken at schools. It took two years to collect all the photographs, and I still continue to collect. You can get an idea about different periods in time thanks to these photographs. A book may write about the 1970s or 1990s as the good old times but photographs do not tell the same thing. I find the expressions and words of individual persons in photographs to be realistic. There is a girl next to two children in a photograph taken in a classroom. But she wrote the note behind when she was 24. She writes: “To my surprise, our teacher was a communist...” What matters from my point of view are the minds of children whom I come across in photographs, and the environments in which they grew up.
You explored village schools for a long time. What did you look for in village schools?
I did not know what to look for in schools before I got there. Sometimes, I felt curious about a closed school and wanted to take a look at it. Sometimes, I ended up painting pictures of children at schools I went to. I have visited tens of schools in Batman, Diyarbakır, Siirt and Mardin. While there, I was on the look out for historical things, and sometimes the names caught my attention. For instance, there is a village called Heştdêr, which literally means Eight Churches. Once there must have been eight churches in that village where, of course, there are ruins of the churches but nothing more. In another place, the village cemetery was next to an Armenian cemetery. These are small pieces of information you are confronted with anytime you walk around.
How did this laboratory of history and photographs take you back to the Abdulhamid period?
I realized something about the education policies of 1930s. There were some local strategies of schooling as well as universal ones. I came to realize this fact when I was visiting village schools. I thought about the possibility that there could be other schools practicing similar strategies that I was looking for, such as what I found on reading cards, writings, chalk drawings and even in how people spoke. However, I never even considered that there could be such a school before the republican period. Needless to say, the number of visual objects that I could find outside decreased in this period, and naturally I felt it necessary to explore libraries. While I was researching about the Hamidiye Cavalry [Hamidiye Alayları], I learned that a tribal chieftain affiliated with the cavalry sent Abdulhamid a telegram asking why their children were not enrolled in the Imperial Tribal School [Mekteb-i Aşiret-i Hümayun] in İstanbul. Upon that telegram, children of wealthy families from the tribes were also enrolled in this school established by Abdulhamid in 1892. This school was established by the Ottoman State for the purpose of consolidating its relations with the tribes in order to maintain control over the territories it was holding in the face of a great loss of territory. The period of study in that school was 15 years, and nearly 50 students graduated each year. It was a school for the children of families who held power in the local tribes.
When I named the exhibition, I took the problems which had flaws at their heart as the departure point. I was especially inspired by the education terminology used: “input-operation-output.” When I realized that the motive to train is the basis for all social organizations, I came to understand that this phenomenon was more of an issue of control than being a matter of discipline. To me, it was not possible to ignore the aspects like the local objectives of such control as well as its universal practices. While this is a condition continuing through the recent past into the present, it also has a history in Ottoman period. Therefore, we can say that by defining the tribes and territories as “input,” school [mekteb] as an “operation” and civilization as an “output,” I tried to prove, so to speak, that the central issue was control.
Graduates of those schools returned home as prominent figures of their society. Now you memorialize them through your paintings. Who are the people that you have portrayed? Who were these people?
The objective of the Tribal School was to imbue the tribal students with loyalty to the Ottoman State and to preserve the territories of these tribes. The imbuing of loyalty proved to be efficient for a while; however, later on some figures show negative responses. During my efforts to understand the school, I found out that opposing figures had continued to remain at the forefront just as they once were at school. Cibranlı Halit was the leading figure among all of them. He established an organization against the state. His activities attracted attention and he was killed. There are similar stories of figures like Molla Hıdır and Hayri Bey. I wanted to deliberate on these oppositional figures in one of my latest works Aferin. How does it become possible that the very person you have tried to make loyal turns out to be a person who is not wanted in the end? This was the question I was curious about. So I tried to understand the situation of reaction, that is, the opposition.
There was a modern curriculum in that school apart from the religious education. What kind of activities, for example, allowed them to rise to prominence after the political figures in your portraits returned home?
They got organized. The power of their organization increased so much that it had the potential to become harmful to the existing power structure of the period. And certainly there were other tribes that could have followed in their footsteps. This situation could not have been pleasant for those in power in that period, considering that all those tribes could conceivably organize a collective action.
I have a different opinion now; I regard “school” more as a space of operation than a place. Also, I think of “civilization” as a method of control. In fact, I have seen these concepts used as instruments.
There is a certain melancholy in the pictures. Children or adults dressed in uniforms...
In my work, I was initially using colors that had less grey. However, as my ideas and outlook on life changed, grey and tones of grey have come to the forefront. I also realized that these tones have an impact on the expressions of people. When I applied this distinction, I also felt distanced from the painting. And it makes me feel good that way. I am not in reality; I just pretend to be.
So, in what ways has being an educator contributed to this story?
I believed I could be an educator after finishing school but I did not know I would produce works on education (laughs). I can say that I practiced the teaching profession in my own paintings. To be active in a field I had comprehensive knowledge about allowed me to minimize what I had to learn. After all, it can be a good thing to know answers from the start.
It is a different experience, just like the experience I have gained from visiting village schools. You do not know where it is going to take you, and even so you want to try it. I go to the penitentiary twice a week for 16 hours in total. We turned a prison ward into a workshop. I am very curious about the sense of restriction. We are already restricted in life outside but the prison creates a more concentrated experience of that. When you teach painting there, you have a camera on the ceiling and you are under the surveillance of a guardian. While I was teaching, I wanted to experience surveillance and of being attentive to my behavior. This is in fact an aggravated form of what we already live in the outside world. We feel terrible whenever we feel restricted. When one enters a place like that, on the other hand, the level of restriction rises to the point that it is a complete experience. You feel inevitably free when you leave the place even though you are not free. As the pressure is increased, you perceive the lower level of pressure as freedom whereas you are controlled in both cases. The number of my students varies each year. We can not have long-run studies because the convicts are transferred from one prison to another so frequently. They love producing beadwork and other arabesque work like that. I think this stems naturally from their visual memories. First of all, I tried to eliminate that culture because it has rendered them quite ordinary, and also has had a negative psychological influence on them. They grow a lot; if you spend seven months with a student, you produce a really beautiful work.
