Korean students wear and comment on Turkish school uniforms in Esra Ersen’s I am Turkish, I am Honest, I am Diligent…

Dialogue brought art to life at the Richmond Art Gallery on July 30 when the public got a chance to participate in a talkback session about its current exhibition, Landed. The exhibition features two video-based installations by Turkish artist Esra Ersen, whose work explores the intersection between identity and culture.

Bracing for the journey

Nan Capogna, curator at the Richmond Art Gallery, chose to feature Ersen’s work because of its focus on the complexities of immigration, which she believed would resonate with the local community.

Capogna thinks that Passengers (2009), a video that follows a group of rural Turkish people on their first bus trip to the seaside, is not only an apt metaphor for the immigrant experience but also a concept that holds universal appeal.

“When people watch Passengers, there is that experience of journey, and I think that everyone can relate to it,” Capogna says.

Art as identity dialogue

Landed has been met with an enthusiastic response, so Capogna decided to add another layer to the project by organizing a talkback session where the public could comment on the exhibition along with two artists whose creative sensibilities resemble Ersen’s.

Sebnem Ozpeta, a Turkish-born, Vancouver-based independent filmmaker and editor, showed a compilation of her short experimental films, which use evocative images such as a woman struggling to get out of a box and travelling through air in a bubble.

Ozpeta said that those images were inspired by her own experience of emigrating to Canada over a decade ago. Though the artist always felt secure in her identity and felt no pressure to assimilate here, her work still actively reacts against Canadian consumer culture and its tendency to strip down cultural diversity.

Pisui Ciyo, an aboriginal (Atayal) multidisciplinary artist from Taiwan, has devoted her career to exploring how the complex relationship between tradition and modernity has shaped her own indigenous culture. Her work attempts to reclaim Taiwanese aboriginal heritage from its colonial Japanese and Chinese influences.

Pisui Ciyo performs Her Silent Innermost (Inllungan na Kneril) at Richmond’s 2013 Your Kontinent Film and Media Arts Festival. | Photo courtesy of Lawrence Lam

Ciyo finds great inspiration in exploring traditional Atayal ceremonies, which treat dance, music and performance as one inextricably linked whole rather than as separate disciplines. She shared a video excerpt from her recent award-winning multidisciplinary theatre piece Her Silent Innermost (Inllungan na Kneril).

Ciyo said that she cherished the opportunity to interweave cultural identities by sharing her art with the Canadian public.

“The audience here is so multicultural, it feels like for them it’s a norm to accept new things,” she says.

Uniform re-imagined

Audience members discuss exhibition with artists.

The discussion at the talkback centered on Ersen’s 2002 piece entitled I am Turkish, I am Honest, I am Diligent…

This work featured a display of Turkish school uniforms that were given to Korean students to wear. The students’ daily writings about the experience of wearing the uniform were printed at the front of the garments.

Several people in attendance reflected on the stark visual impact of the uniforms and on how they comment on cultural appropriation, since they were Turkish in origin but worn by Korean children.

Ciyo said that this work made her wish that aboriginal Taiwanese could adopt their traditional clothing as school uniforms.

However for Ozpeta, the uniforms were an unpleasant reminder of the patriarchal aspects of Turkish culture that prompted her move to Canada.

They are also a symbol of the subtle connection between the personal and the political, something Ozpeta and Ciyo aren’t afraid to explore. An example of that is the recent environmental protests in Istanbul, which Ozpeta has featured in her work.

“I was amazed by how people protested peacefully and artfully. My generation just stood there with their identity,” she says.

If you would like to reflect more deeply on the relationship between art and cultural identity, be sure to check out Landed at the Richmond Art Gallery, where it runs until August 18.