The Empire Project is hosting Merve Tuna’s first solo exhibition titled “The Case of O” at Küçük Mustafa Paşa Hamam between February 10 and March 12, 2022, with the contributions of Mermeriş.
Equally artistic, and personal, she has mapped, quite meticulously, with hand-embroidery, analytical works with titles like, “Psychic Murder Syndrome” on canvas, displaying, in a series of terms, timelines, and graphs, her expression of going through unconscious life paths, as influenced by none other than Sigmund Freud, Donald Winnicott and others.
It begins with the oral, where, in Tuna’s understanding, the milk-giving breast of a mother, or female woman, is a child’s first experience with giving and taking pleasure. Next is the phase known as anal, in which feelings of shame form around bathroom rituals. That is then followed by the phallic, or early sexualization of the body, before coming to fruition in the genital stage.
With the Britney Spears song, “Toxic” on loop, the music then shifts to a more ambient mood under the original designs of Avi Medina, offering a mellifluous, while at times eerie flow to the atmospheric pressure, heightened by a slew of objects that Tuna has collected. She describes herself as a fetishist, hoarding all shapes and sizes of anything that might fit in her baggage.
The sheer degree, the prolific immensity of her object-oriented practice, as an artist, has a singular curatorial bent in and of itself. By placing a seemingly innocent handle, or tool, something like a crystal stopper on a glass liquor vessel, within her oeuvre, the piece transforms into a dream-like emanation of her beautifully obsessive compulsions.
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She stood, at one point, on a raised platform, and surrounded by mother-of-pearl inlay, as the floating dust of the silent, cool hamam interior rose against shafts of natural light, and spoke about a piece, titled, “Masculator”, made with silver-plated (antimicrobial) bronze, and black patinated bronze. It was like a pair of shiny antlers with just a long, curving nose for a face.
In her text accompanying the show, Deniz Kırkalı wrote thoughtfully, describing Tuna’s art as an amalgamation of psychoanalysis, film and mathematics. Objects are bodies are stories, and with a knack for fashion and production design, Tuna has engaged with them fully. Her show is an embodiment of their personalities, and she is deepening her ties with them.
As an extension of human form, reconfigured, nearly abstractly, Kırkalı reflected on the question of pleasure outside of the body. It would appear that Tuna has created a frame for people to simply imagine, by looking at a thing, the pleasure or pain it might give them. And in that way she has conjured the power of objects.
“The Case of O” is not in the least overtly exploitative of human sexuality. It is not shocking in a capitalistic sense. It is a tasteful, artful exploration of the psychological potency that objects, just by being themselves, can provoke. And that is what Tuna has done herself, by being seen, courageously, as herself, like everyone, an animate object which acts and is acted on at once.