Timing

Nezaket Ekici
Kopfsonate
Claire Oliver
513 West 26th Street



The extremely short press release gives the impression that Nezaket Ekici’s video installation Kopfsontate is supposed to represent a bodily exploration of music; but what I see is nostalgia. Up the stairs in the loft gallery at Claire Oliver, the wall space is painted black and a sequence of eight, flat-screen televisions hang horizontally across one side before a row of low, black benches. The windows and stairs on either end make the gallery feel like it has been deliberately removed from the rest of the world; as though it exists as a moment instead of a place. The video itself is a multi-channel repetition of Ekici drowning herself in the Black sea. Each screen offers the same endless expanse of deep purple water receding into the distant horizon of blue mountains under a pale, cloudy sky. In the midst of this eternal landscape Ekici, choreographed to a piano sonata, submerges and reemerges in each screen in time with the notes. This action repeated on multiple screens at a time has a sense of creating the notes as much as representing them.

What sets the piece apart from a simple act of choreography, though, is the rewind. It is clear right from the top what a lot of theater this is; a woman with bound breasts and water-logged hair sticking to her face, drowning herself again and again to sappy-soft music? It's easy to write off as some sort of feme-fatal/feminist gobldy-gook at best. But the rewind is the element that changes the conversation. Instead of just submerging forward in time, Ekici winds back and undoes her actions on one screen while living them on the next. The visual effect hits like some notes are an act of remembering, trying to remember, or even regret, instead of allowing a forward motion to continue. While the music may move on, this woman is restricted to one moment. The notes drag Ekici back into herself, and in time: binding her actions, drowning her ambitions.

And that is nostalgia as it happens in life. We move forward in each moment within time and space while simultaneously reliving our experiences internally. We drown in our own sense of longing, loss, hope, desire, and any number of other evocations that give us pause, and pull us inside ourselves. In living, there is no one moment of complete submersion or complete consciousness, just a sequence of multiples and interpretation and flux. Living is experiencing and remembering; and the way those two acts inform each other. Time is the music we apply to measure our progress.