Merve Ertufan

Backdrifts

2016; sound loop (20mins), watercolor drawings, and artist books
Produced with the support of Bstart Production Fund.

Backdrifts is a take on remembrance and reconciliation. It is a work in which the artist drifts back to the past, into her personal time in Stockholm, where she lived for 4,5 years; both to come to terms with it and to close the chapter.
In this work, the audience encounters a recollection (sound work), a revisit of an old unfinished business (artist books), and a study on the threshold (drawings) that marks a period as a past.

Sound: 8 distinct instances of anecdotal narration; stories of bicycles, dreams and exes. Each narration behaves like a wave and much like memories, they wander around travelling from one ear to the other: in constant flux, in and out of our attention.

Artist books: Revision of an old unfinished work. A work that had started during Swedish courses, encompassing all the grammar mistakes, but was never binded to turn them into books. It was “almost finished, but not quite”. With the intention to summon a sort of closure, the old work was finalized with a commentary that declares exactly that.

Drawings: Based on 5 documents that carry the date of 15/01/2013 (a date that “must be important because it stuck in my brain” as the owner of the voice claims), this is a study on the threshold that marks the artist’s return to Istanbul. Double-sided watercolor drawings are made based on a newspaper from Stockholm, passport exit stamp, boarding pass, passport entry stamp, and a newspaper from Istanbul. On one side there is only the content, and the other side has the outlines of the said document.

backdrifts
backdrifts
backdrifts
backdrifts
backdrifts