Rhythm of Transience, Rhythm of Happiness (2014)

artist book made in collaboration with Meltem Ahıska, 22x25 cm., Turkish and English editions, 61 pages

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A  book we made together with sociologist and writer Meltem Ahıska upon being invited to the exhibition "Stay With Me," a collection of artist books/notebooks about the 2013 Gezi uprising in Turkey. We came together to look at photographs I had taken during the uprising, the year leading up to it and its aftermath, and talked about what Meltem had been reflecting on. The relationship among happiness, transience, progress and destruction proposed by Walter Benjamin ended up being what we dwelt on most. After Meltem wrote a text we placed the photographs next to its fragments and ordered them. 

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“Benjamin radically proposes to reflect on transience as eternal. The rhythm of transience gives us the rhythm of happiness... ‘the rhythm consists in an apprehension that all is bound to pass away, undergo its downfall, then this rhythm, the rhythm of transience itself, is eternal, and this rhythm is precisely what connects the inner life of the person, the person who suffers, with what is eternal.’”
(A quote from the text by Meltem Ahıska.)

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The exhibition was curated by Selda Asal and hosted by Apartment Project, Berlin; DEPO, Istanbul; Corridor Project Space, Amsterdam; and 21er Haus, Vienna.

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