dots/dashes/dots: S.O.S
Artists: Deniz Aktaş, Arda Diben, Tuğçe Diri, Lara Sayılgan
Curator: Hasan Bülent Kahraman
According to Derrida, drawing happens always in darkness, within the unknown. The moment the pencil touches the surface, the one who draws is blind. She reaches into a void. This is because seeing does not belong to the present; it is always tied to the past. We draw what we have seen. Like writing, drawing is an act of memory.
In Ancient Greece, metaphysics was concerned with the present moment -with what exists. It was the present that presented itself as present. Husserl disrupted this order by developing phenomenology, arguing that perception is the foundation of philosophy. For Husserl, philosophy begins with perception, and the world is bounded by the limits of what I perceive. If I am the one drawing, I do so in accordance with the way I perceive the world, with how the way it manifests itself to me, how it materializes within me. Thus, drawing cannot surpass me; it remains bound to the world I see. Metaphysics, then, is rooted in what we see, yet it begins by stepping away from the immediacy of the present. Drawing, too, exists outside the present -it occurs in the now, but the hand that draws is always guided memory, which carries the past.
Drawing is tied to geometry. Geometry exists as an outside reality -one that can be dismantled and reconfigured, its lines’ objectivity altered, along with the meaning of the object, both as it appears to us and as it is given in nature, thus shaping its drawing. Yet, to achieve this -to work with a single line and on a surface- one must still operate within the constraints of geometry. Geometry is the order of the world as it is given to us, one of its many orders. To reflect it, to bring it onto a surface, is to affirm the world’s reality -yet to reshape it is to establish a new order.
Dots, dashes, dots - that is the reality of drawing. The tip of the pencil marks the point; its movement traces a line. And that is an SOS. Drawing holds the key to renewing the world, and every key is made to open a lock. SOS, - dots, dashes, dots - is a call for a new world, a plea for a new order, a geometry emerging from a world enclosed within itself, precipitated in our memories.
An SOS from physics to metaphysics, suspended between the vitality of memory and the reality of perception.
Drawing is an SOS.
Hasan Bülent Kahraman