Performance Installation 2018

1.Kunst und Kulturfestival, Kulturakademie Tarabya 30.6.2018

In her performance installation "dal non-finito al finito" (A.T.) the artist deals with the history of the "sculpture". The term "non-finito" (not finished) is a fixed term in art history. It was already used by Michelangelo and used by August Rodin as a fixed stylistic device. For financial reasons, Michelangelo repeatedly produced unfinished sculptures. August Rodin, on the other hand, deliberately used the unfinished nature of the sculptures to evoke emotions in the viewer.

The artist Nezaket Ekici is on a pedestal and is covered with a coarse clay mass approx. 1 hour before the live performance on the pedestal, so that the artist can no longer be seen roughly modeled. As soon as the audience arrives, they see a massive clay mass on the pedestal, a lump rather than a human-like form. Slowly the artist frees herself with her hands from the clay mass. With her hand she then models her body step by step out of the clay mass. The clay mass, which has fallen away from her and is in some way a waste product of the performance, she now uses to form a clay sphere. In this way she takes on the role of the sculptor in two ways: on the one hand she models herself as an individual and on the other hand she models an object. In an emphatic sense, she designs herself as a non-finito version of the ancient figure of the "Atlas", which carries the globe on its hands. If Atlas and the world on his shoulders can be regarded as a divine unity, Nezaket Ekici is here the human - non-finito - version of the atlas in female form. In her performance, Ekici refers to older performances such as "blind" (2007), where she was imprisoned in a plaster sarcophagus and freed herself, and to her work "Pondus" (2015), in which she boxed a life-size block of clay with her bare hands until holes appeared in the mass of clay. She takes a new perspective with her new work by freeing her own body from the clay mass to become part of a non-finito clay sculpture. Even with the formation of the clay globe, she becomes only approximately a whole sculpture, because she remains a human being.

Pedestal, Clay

Preparation: 1 hour

Performance: 35 min

Assistants: Cagla Sönmez Cakir, Özgü Kutlu Türer, Pelin Terzi, Ayse Tanman

Camera and editing: Baran Sasoglu

Photo: Bülent Cakir

Curator: Pia Entenmann