GOOD-BYE PARADISE?
PerformancePlays for the exhibition “THIS PLAY”
on 27 January 2023 at ARTER MUSEUM, Istanbul

Photos: Sena Nur Taştekne © ARTER Museum 2023

“Children, when they play with any junk that comes under their fingers, transform into toys even that which belongs to the sphere of economics, war, law and other activities that we are accustomed to regard as serious. A car, a firearm, a legal contract are transformed at a stroke into a toy. (...) And this does not mean the absence of care, but a new dimension of use supplied to humanity by children and philosophers." (Giorgio Agamben in “Profanations”)

Thinking up “games” and “unique places” – as in the ARTER Museum’s current exhibition This Play – has been a theme not only in art but also in music for centuries. Bach created a canon of riddles in 1685, Mozart his famous minuet with dice game in 1787. At the beginning of the 20th century Erik Satie devised a piece in the shape of a pear, the Dadaists turned theatre and the use of language upside down. Especially in the second half of the last century the boundaries between the visual and the auditory dissolved: above all in the Fluxus movement and the musical avant-garde, and in particular with Nam June Paik and John Cage, to name just two examples.

However, the principle of play must not be confused with mere entertainment. Nowadays, objects, human activities – and with them playing – are subject to certain material values, functions and cultural-political norms. To eradicate these and to free things from religious custom as well from functional social norms by means of art is perhaps the only way to experience playing as saving the beautiful and the paradise. For when things are no longer playfully connected to us, they become dark monsters that cast a heavy, anechoic shadow. They tell us nothing.

The principle of play, the “narrative play”, is to invent a place. Kunsu Shim puts it this way: “An empty space is a nowhere; an unrecorded time tells nothing. Music, however, invents a space and tells a story without words. This is what we call poetry. Its way of telling is like the metabolism of a living being, a photosynthesis between the self and the other. Physical means above all “feeling oneself”. A feeling body can think for itself and put itself into the world. Poetry is the invention of a place to animate it, rather than materialising it as a purely biological laboratory. Poetry is not a topological nowhere, but a place of splendour and misery. In the end, perhaps, when our time has passed, can we tell that we have been here, played and lived and dreamed of a future? But if a place that can be told is still there, paradise has not yet been completely lost.”

The programme

Gerhard Stäbler and Kunsu Shim developed the concept GOOD-BYE PARADISE? for the ARTER Museum in Istanbul as part of their six-week stay in the artist residency of the Kunststiftung NRW. Original programme flyer in Turkish and English: here

The interview with Gerhard Stäbler and Kunsu Shim

The journalistic multimedia platform Medyascope.tv, founded in 2015, published an interview with Gerhard Stäbler and Kunsu Shim on 5 February 2023. The interlocutor was Cihan Ataş: here

Link to the event on the website of the ARTER Museum (in English): here
Link to the event on the website of the ARTER Museum (in Turkish): here

With the support of the Kunststiftung NRW and the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of NRW