The artist started to regularly record his frequent waiting at different places and at different times by adding drawings besides the notes, ideas and sketches in his notebooks. He does this by (always) drawing just his feet and the ground. The Turkish notion of time is different to our own, in Turkey, already the understanding of a timetable as such is much more flexible and indefinite … giving rise to a lot of waiting. In offices, at the doctor’s, on the bus (in rush hour), in the shop, in college, in meetings. This is how three notebooks of drawings have been produced since 2013 that follow his daily life, whereas by identifying the ground (the mosque, the market, the concrete ground…) we may also decipher certain fragments of Turkish culture.

 

As curators, we invited them to take on a very special collaboration: a joint piece. Their dialogue began in the virtual world and continues during Bariş’s two-week residency in Ljubljana before the exhibition. The presented work is the result of the intertwining of their practices and personal dialogue: a diary entry of their common everyday through drawing on various supports.
Neža Jurman will continue to work on the installation throughout the exhibition by adding or taking something away, thus using the time component to further highlighting the recording of daily life in diary form.
The title of the piece stems from the Slovenian phonetic record of the Turkish phrase ‘kurba virak virak’ meaning ‘žaba rega kvak’ in Slovenian or ‘frog croak croak’ in English, with an additional meaning in the title provided by the play on words which ensues in the Slovenian language and means ‘whore, devil, devil’.

 

Production: SCCA–Ljubljana, Center for Contemporary Arts / World of Art, School for Curators and Critics of Contemporary Art
Co-Production: Škuc Gallery

 

Supported by: Ljubljana Municipality, Department for Culture, Ministry of Culture of Republic of Slovenia, European Cultural Foundation, Lipica Stud Farm (www.lipica.org), National Gallery of Slovenia, Turkish Embassy in Ljubljana, Turkish Airlines, Embassy of the Republic of Slovenia in Ankara