Video Performance 2018

Wearing a blue and white Dirndl dress, a traditional form of woman’s clothes in Germany, Nezaket Ekici walks down an empty stone quarry carrying a hoe and a bucket. The camera shifts angles, showing us the precarious nature of the place she is in: large broken rocks crowd the road, her short kitten heels fumble and stride uneasily over the craggy path. Changing once more to an aerial view, the audience is shown the entire landscape and the overwhelming size of the quarry is revealed, as well as the immense 100sqm black square of gravel Ekici slowly moves towards. Over the course of many hours, “My German Tradition” documents Ekici working by herself to transform the black square of gravel (reminiscent of Kasimir Malewitsch’s own “Black Square” (from 1915) painting, an icon of modern art and considered the beginning of non-objective painting. Malevich’s piece marks the transition to abstraction by depicting the pure form of the square on a white background. To this context, Ekici brings the traditional German Fachwerkhaus. Infusing the tradition of her German costume and architecture with the abstract geometric “Black Square,” Ekici’s performance, which takes place in a stone quarry where modern technological machines craft nature into buildings, supports an augmented view of modernity as an extension of nature and past. As an immigrant artist born in Turkey who grew up in Germany, Ekici has worked often in other performances with Turkish culture and traditions, but investigated German traditions only on two occasions in her art (“Bollenhut” (2018), “Kaffeeklatsch” (2019)). The stone quarry, with its massive crater of unpolished and uncrafted stones, is the location of much physical creation: we extract from it in order to build the fundamental structures society requires. Ekici enters this space where nature is turned generative through machinery and human labour, and asks a different question: what does it mean to construct tradition, to build culture? The symbol of the Fachwerkhaus which she etches with the hoe by dragging geometric lines into the black square, stands as a testament to her both belonging in and externality to German traditions. She is both German, and also an immigrant. Throughout the performance, Ekici repeatedly gets as close as possible to the gravel: she lies down in the rocks, plays with the dirt with her hands, even smoothing and caressing it. This form of ‘inhabitation’ of the Fachwerkhaus augments her existential representation of a body which is both part of tradition (inhabiting the house), and un-represented by it (the ‘Fachwerkhaus’ is afterall, made of stone). In the last image, the aerial camera view shows the final completed product of the Fachwerkhaus, and Ekici confidently and slowly walks out of the black square: she departs the creation, while leaving behind her own essence of German tradition. (Text: Jono Wang Chu)

Hoe, dirndl dress, bucket, black gravel

Video: 8:59min Live Performance: 10 hours

Camera Work & Editing: Branka Pavlovic Sound: Jonja Loncar Curator: Friederike Fast Production: Henrik Müller Thanks to the Firm: Kalk-und Mergelwerke H.Müller GmbH & Co. KG, Halle/Westfalen