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Fig. 2.23
Captured (cannon balls)
by Tamiko Thiel (
2011a
). Augmented Reality. Virtual nazar
boncu gu glass amulets with animated eyeballs. Seen in the Istanbul Biennale exhibition “Untitled
(Death by Gun),” with Kris Martin's
Obussen II
In
Captured (cannon balls)
the ever-present Turkish nazar boncu gu glass amulets
were stacked in piles inside the Biennale exhibit “Untitled (Death by Gun).” These
amulets shatter when they avert the evil eye - what would it mean to use them as
cannonballs (Fig.
2.23
)?
Several works deal with the pencil as a symbolic weapon of rhetoric and
propaganda for sides, whether journalist, blogger or bureaucrat. They can be fat
as cannon as in
Captured (cannon)
, as stubby as projectiles as in
Captured (shells)
,
which I placed in the exhibit “Untitled (Death by Gun),” or surround the viewer
completely as in
Captured (stockade)
, placed in the exhibition “Untitled (Passport)”
(see Fig.
2.24
).
Of course the pencil has long been replaced by the digital, so I created
Captured
(for RSF_RWB)
and placed it also in the exhibit “Untitled (Passport).” The name
derives from the Twitter hash tag of Reporters Sans Frontières (Reporters Without
Borders), and the artwork consists of RSF_RWB tweets in which I censored the
substantive words and animated them to surround the viewer in a constant flashing
stream (Fig.
2.25
).
Finally, as a memorial to the assassinated Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant
Dink I created
Captured (for Hrant)
. I took the last artifact we saw of him, his worn
shoe soles sticking out from under the sheet covering his dead body in the middle
of a main street in Istanbul. The shoe soles, in gold, wander around the viewer. This
work I put against the stark geometric purity of Biennale architect Ryue Nishizawa's
container walls (Fig.
2.26
).
