She continues her work in Ankara, focusing on emotions, particularly shame, in relation to new media, art, and society.
The individual’s relationship with their own essence is determined within a framework shaped or reorganized by others. These “others,” the agents of this re-creation, are the social structure in its entirety. Even in their loneliest moments, a human being is never completely isolated or alone. From birth to death, sociality -which makes the existence of an individual detached from others impossible- manifests itself through a series of rules, and the way these rules operate leads us to the concept around which this exhibition is structured: the feeling of shame.
The boundaries of the individual’s field of action and thought intersect with the framework of shame.
What is improper, private, or sinful also determines what must be avoided, what is undesirable, and what produces guilt and shame. The world of meaning and action possessed by all potentials that are shamed, prohibited, deemed indecent, or considered disgraceful, and imposed through them, is learned and reproduced in everyday life. The dichotomy of emotional experience places the self and the other at opposing poles. Sartre quotes the phrase, “I am ashamed of myself as I appear to the Other,” and, by formalizing shame, add: “If one of these dimensions disappears, shame disappears as well.” Thus, the plane of shame encompasses the self, the other, and the cognition related to emotion.
Shame is an emotion characterized by its physical manifestations: the lowering of the head, shrinking, the desire to hide… All these reactions of shame become visible in the body, which is a form of the individual’s existence and relationality. Sara Ahmed understands shame as an emotion “to do with being seen, with appearing before others, and with how one is seen by others.”** Traces of shame, then, are intertwined with every moment of cultural and everyday life.
So where does the determination of all these judgments rest? How much shame is internal, and how much is external? As seeking answers to these questions, the exhibition approaches shame as a social emotion. In this way, each work included in the exhibition enters the field of individual experience to the extent of its creation, and the field of social experience to the extent that it is presented. This positioning of shame is discussed in the exhibition in relation to other affective forms with which it is connected, narratives of action and inaction, and the capacity of this emotion to shape existence. The works brought together reflect a diversity that produces discourse by conveying the body as the outwardly displayed space of emotional life, the dialogues it enters into or fails to enter into with the other, and the modes of expression it establishes or cannot establish. Shame appears in the exhibited works sometimes as an emotion that is rebelled against, sometimes as one that crushes, and at other times as one that is accepted and internalized, reflected onto the material and, through it, onto the viewer.
Shame is not always present in a pure, visible, and observable state. The more it is internalized on individual and social levels, the more it needs to be excavated to be brought to light. As a tool for this in-depth excavation, the exhibition aims to encourage reflection on the fluidity of emotions while presenting a composition that depicts a spectrum extending from chasm to overlap between the internal experience of emotion and its social positioning.
In the information age sliding into the post-truth phase, the only reliable resource left in the individual’s hands is their own emotions. But how much of these emotions come from the core, how much are directed, and how are lived experiences shaped through “shaming”? Don’t Look, I Am Not There, aims to ignite a spark of introspection in the postmodern age, where individuals see themselves more but understand themselves less, within the contested depth of their relationship with themselves. By reading the surrounding world through emotions, the works in the exhibition lead the viewer toward self-understanding.
The exhibition aims to serve as a mediator for the visitor to recognize the emotion of shame, confront it, and ultimately reflect on how they choose to position themselves in the face of shame by seeking its origins and effects both within and beyond themselves.
* Sartre, J.P. (1956). Being and Nothingness. (H. E. Barnes, Trans.). New York: Washington Square Press.
** Ahmed, S. (2004). The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.