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Pleasure as an Emancipatory Practice

Exhibition Text by Deniz Kırkalı

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Merve Tuna’s exhibition The Case of O: Scenes, Formulations, Derivations, is equally about bodies, objects, and stories. It is a culmination of her background in fashion and production design; longtime interest in psychoanalysis, film, and mathematics; and fascination with materials as well as making techniques that provoke certain feelings she finds worthy of chasing after. Walking through the various rooms of the exhibition, namely the genital, phallic, anal and oral rooms, you are surrounded by objects that are extensions, insertions, additions, stories of and references to the human body. You see bodies everywhere, very few in the form of human bodies. 

 

The one question I find myself keep circling back to since I got to know Merve’s practice is “How does pleasure look outside of the body?” Pleasure is a sensual and a phenomenological concept. It is rather bodily, libidinal, sought after, and almost always associated with positive connotations. Pleasure is supposed to feel good. But how pleasure looks or what it can look like is not as objectively or clearly defined. What bodily pleasure might look like outside of the body is, in fact, a situated notion. Corporeal pleasure, which for me is rather liquid, fluid, permeable, in Merve’s visual world and fantasyland, is made concrete, hard, shiny, malleable. It invites one to imagine how pleasure might be visualised in an object which is perhaps waiting to be a source of pleasure. Yet, the object also exists on its own outside of and separated from a body that activates it. The object, with its unyielding agency, dictates a certain way of approaching, using, and relating to it. 

 

How can we think of these fetish objects, which might or might not be used for sexual pleasure or gratification, as extensions of bodies? This, for me, is particularly compelling as a posthuman question. The moment or the ways in which the body meets things ‘outside’ of itself is loaded with information. And that information allows one to build imaginary worlds that are not mere fiction or sources of escape but realms of emancipation and potential. 

 

Fetish and fantasy has a lot to do with fictioning and world-making. The case Merve is building through the objects in the exhibition, mirrors her systematic thinking that tends to select, categorise, name and encode information, references, and materials. It is a rather delineated world, its limits and narratives are cautiously set and there is little room for intervention. Her self-proclaimed object fetishism and underlying masochistic impulses dictate what, how and where. She is an avid collector in that sense; selecting, organising and rearranging, often very intuitively. Yet, pleasure and the shame that such pleasure might often be thought together with are highly subjective, personal and unique phenomena. Therefore, here I am inserting (no pun intended) myself and my ways of engaging with the fictional world Merve is very attentively crafting and communicating through words, symbols, sketches, sound, and last but not least, objects (or alternatively scenes, formulations, and derivations). The objects, some of which are, in fact, familiar, tend to become unfamiliar, something other than they are or they were. Their potentiality is revealed and therefore they create room for further imagination, stories, fantasies and worlds to be made. Their uncanniness stands as an invitation for world-making as they vaguely oscillate between familiar/comforting and disturbing/uncanny. 

 

Merve’s works are, to me, not merely stories of psychosexual development stages but just stories, her stories indeed. They unfold in the exhibition space in a certain pattern and rhythm, following an outlined narrative but nevertheless inviting to promiscuously multiply this narrative. The room to play is created only to be penetrated, challenged, and further experimented in. The music in the exhibition follows this fictional narrative as another sensory component and places the body in this fictionalised space, in front of the displayed objects, in a crafted and calculated manner. It reminds one that they are a body. 

 

The timeline which provides the framework of the narrative Merve is threading through the four rooms is presented to the audience very explicitly in the exhibition. Her methodology using narrative, color, and sound as elements that moulds the experience of the exhibition are recognized components of filmmaking. And her material-driven practice is one that emphasizes tactility and rigorous making. These strategies compose the backbone of The Case of O:Scenes, Formulations, Derivations in which she thrives to understand, conceptualize and trace her triggers for pleasure, thinking, and making. 

 

Using the objects outside of their purpose, making references to what they could be reveals and encourages a childlike imagination and leaves one in a limbo of scenes that could potentially unfold. In this in-betweenness, it opens space for further unconscious or deliberate associations. The mode of display of these objects, through vitrines and iron-framed glass cabinets which seem fit for medical tools or antiques and crystals but instead presenting compositions of daily objects, defies an awaited shame, working through politics and aesthetics of visibility and presentation. It confronts the invisible or the hidden. As Merve tries out some limits (of her own and of all bodies wandering in the rooms and cavities of the hammam), she challenges and messes with the ideas of where shame comes from as much as how shame can be transformed. And in doing so, lays out a foundation for thinking pleasure, outside of a body and as an emancipatory practice.