Publications

From the catalog of solo exhibition "I can do it too"

Since 1995 Yesim Agaoglu has produced eight magnificent poetry books that made her famous as young women poet in the literary scene of Turkey. The emphasis in her poems is on exploration of the most obscure dreams, desires and intentions of the soul and the unpredictable relations between individuals, however in between the layers of poetic descriptions she allows the reader to pass through a socio-political terrain that reflects her critical approach to the order of things. She discloses this complexity in a surrealist mode intertwined with an exhilarating openness of subject and form. Her imaginative qualities also owe much to her education in archeology and cinema.

Since a decade Yesim Agaoglu has also concentrated on art making with performances, visual material and objects. At the beginning her poems written on yellow paper with conventional typewriter occupy the center of these works. The yellow pages are a basic material and modest elements of communication with the people, but when they are arranged in huge geometrical heaps in the exhibition spaces they also become a Fluxus installation. Her presence in the exhibition space is considered as performance, even if she does not make performance in the sense that she is directly involved into the process of the art work, but her continuous blending into the viewers attendance gives the impression of a performance. Indeed at one work she invited a travesty to distribute her poems on travesty.

The poetry on these yellow pages, always giving us a glimpse into the hopes, fears, desires, aspirations and accomplishments also convey messages that is connected with the concept, with the socio-political environment of the exhibition or with the current sociopolitical milieu in general. Her approach to art-making is minimalist and modest. Avoiding popularity and sophistication she describes her works as "technically simple but conseptly rich".

Now and then the yellow poetry pages are crumpled and put into the bird cages, into old suitcases, into a guitar box or into simple wooden boxes of vegetables and fruit to be taken by the viewer. Sometimes she arranges the yellow poetry pages to a clothesline with simple pegs or viewers collect her poems from the branches of a tree. Whether with her poems of with her photographs, her work can be classified as indoor and outdoor, following the given conditions for the exhibition she is participating. Always obeying her instinct to collaborate with the viewer through the materials and images she is utilizing she thinks that the combination of the verbal and visual serves her intentions.

Agaoglu has conceived her Baku exhibition as a re-arrangement of her previous works, together with the new ones she has not exhibited before. The yellow pig is a hand made toy of her childhood days; she used to transform the lemons into small pigs by using match sticks. Dozens of lemon pigs are displayed as a floor installation. She utilizes the clothes pigs with manual inscriptions of lines selected from her poems. The viewers are invited to search her poems on yellow paper from a big heap of straw bale, as if they are searching for gold.

As a photographer Agaoglu journeys into the city's simple and elaborate images, focusing on the hybrid architecture, on the human diversity, on the gender differentiations and on to the well hidden ideological symbols and manifestations. Her photographs reflect a kinship to her poems; most of the time the camera catches a surrealistic moment that can be translated into a poetic phrase. She employs photography as a tool of memory when she records the furniture of an empty house and displays them on the board of a dressing table in the same house, which is being used as the exhibition space. Or she creates confusing double scenery when she pastes a series of photography showing open skies with the white tracks of the military jets on the windows of the exhibition space from where one can see the real open sky. Like her poems photography printed or copied on plain paper serves as a material of conveying her message to the viewer and obliging him/her to enter into a mode of exchange. Even if she shows ordinary or marginal people in her photography, whose privacy might be exploited, she copes up with intrusive voyeurism, even avoids it, by implementing a poetic view into the theme.

Yesim Agaoglu is one of the active artists in today's art scene, which is by and large confined to Istanbul, due to the lack of contemporary art dimension in the cultural policy of Turkey, depending on the state subventions and local government initiatives which in turn need the necessary expertise and knowledge. Being a highly sensitive artist to socio-political environment of our region, it is a necessity for her to convey her messages through particular strategies in art making; and, every time she invents new ones. She is decidedly doing well in fulfilling the prerequisites of approaching the distant public of contemporary art.

Beral Madra, April,  2008