Performance Installation 2021 Presented at: Bangkok Art & Culture Centre (BACC) 8th floor 5.1.-11.1.2021 10:30-6:30 pm in the frame of : Bangkok Art Biennale 2020: "Escape Routes" 29.10.2020- 31.1.2021 Curated by Prof. Dr. Apinan Poshyananda, invited by Marina Abramovic

Note: Before Nezaket Ekici did the Performance “Zero Point” she was in a Hotel in Bangkok for two weeks in Quarantine: In “Zero Point,” Nezaket Ekici explores the meaning of home and place, questioning how one’s sense of belonging is both created and maintained. Presented as a performance installation at the Bangkok Art & Culture Centre (BACC), Ekici set up large, 2.5 meter tall block letter and 10 meter long installation which spelled out “HOME”. For a week for 8 hours a day, she set out attempting to live her life with only a backpack (where all her materials like clothes, book, water, soap, skipping rope, sleeping bag were kept), and food bucket. She walked, ate, slept, washed, and exercised for 8 hours within these 8 letters. Remnants of Ekici’s daily life are scattered throughout: a water bottle half-finished, clothes neatly folded, cleaning supplies, even a sleeping bag transformed into a weight. As the crushing sense of boredom sets in, Ekici displays a life that attempts vigorously to fight against it—she skips rope, cleans, eats, and moves with agility between the tall letters. Ekici attempts to live within this word “HOME”—literally, physically, symbolically. She lies across the letters, balances between them, stores food, hangs laundry, exercises, and rests. Yet the performance makes clear: these letters may spell a destination and they may constitute a signified place, but they cannot offer shelter. They cannot satisfy that homeward feeling of “Sehnsucht”. Ekici is a nomadic artist with Turkish roots raised in Germany, and this lived experience of cultural dislocation is presented with existential force in her performance. Her “home” is never singular or permanent. Instead, “Zero Point” captures the condition of someone always searching for grounding—someone who has inherited movement as her native state. The tall letters function less as walls and more as a provisional structure: a temporary scaffolding upon which she may project the idea of a home, symbolizing its necessities and machinations, without ever being able to settle into its comfort. Her body, stretched across the curves of the 'O' or tucked behind the 'E', must be both vulnerable and tenacious; as much as she displays a soul which seeks comfort at ‘home’, she fights to create her own Heimat, here and now. Zero Point was performed as part of the exhibition Escape Routes, reflecting on themes of displacement, exile, and the refugee experience. Ekici uses the word “HOME” as a sculptural dwelling, connecting her performance to those who flee and must reimagine life without stable shelter. She responds to the essential ask of a ‘homeland’ when one has nothing to return to—representing the daily struggle of placing oneself into alien or foreign conditions. Through bodily action and daily rituals, she embodies the question of how one continues living while searching for a new place to belong. “Zero Point” is not only about home. It is involved in all that constitutes our human state of belonging: what one bears as daily ritual, what gives us comfort, what inhabits us with the indestructible feeling of kinship. Ekici explores the psychological cost of a life lived in motion, where belonging is intermittent and always slightly out of reach. In its minimalist staging, the work evokes the paradox of exile and attachment: to seek home is to confront its simultaneous absence from one’s life. Ekici's performance is a quiet reckoning with rootlessness—a recognition that home may never be found in place or language, but must be continually made through body, gesture, and conscious living. (Text: Jono Wang Chu)

Backpack ,skipping rope, book, soap, cloths, food, water, sleeping bag

5.1.-11.1.2021 10:30-6:30 pm = 8 hours Total: 56 hours

Camera and fotos by Bangkok Art Biennale