If I were to collect the conventions of writing, scrunch them into a ball, and toss them to one side. If I were instead to write with ease, fluidity, and freedom, I would create ‘free verse’. I would ignore pre-instated patterns of meter, rhyme, and musical intonation. I would follow my route, producing, in turn, what can otherwise be called ‘natural speech’. A method that is perhaps well-known to many writers amongst us, yet one where the distinct question arises of what happens if this same language one speaks, one writes with, sits outside of the borders of what is considered ‘free’, ‘neutral’, ‘natural’?
What if this language is politicized, and polarized? What if, in order to move with freedom in this language, new rules, and new constraints must be employed to the vernacular itself, in order to be manipulated into preordained forms and codes? What does this ask of us as witnesses, and as collective voices to one another?
The work of Betül Aksu plays with, or, perhaps it could be argued, plays against, themes of border zones, restriction, regulation, individualization, and the impact of bureaucratic infrastructures on our relationship with movement, freedom, and, ultimately, language. Her work toils with how our words, what we choose to speak and to write, ultimately delineate the spaces in which bodies are able to move, and how this holds the potential to move us towards spaces of mutual support and collectivity.
I was aware of the context from which Betül worked when I came to watch “Still in my Quotidian”. A lecture performance by Siwar Kraytem, Betül Aksu, Alev Ersan, and Hanieh Fatouraee, hosted at De Appel in Amsterdam on the 21 March 2024. The performance was based on previously published diary entries documenting Siwars’ evolving relationship with the language since moving to the Netherlands, mainly as a testament to herself and a way of keeping her promise to the language.
In the middle of the Tolstraat space that newly homed De Appel, Betül sat placidly facing the fellow performers, each dressed entirely in black. The performance, signaled by Betül, started with a simple sentence, “I wrote two letters to my mother tongue”. Two letters. One mother tongue. What does it mean to write a letter to language itself? Not just a language, but a mother tongue. Betül later provides the audience with a clear answer: “as a testament to myself and a way of keeping my promise to the language.”
The language here is both tangible and intangible. A place, a space that provides us with one of our first and most integral tools to feel through and make sense of the worlds and realities we are surrounded by and inherently implicated within. Language that at times accommodates and at others estranges. Language as a confrontational tool that addresses questions of privilege, hierarchy, and precarity, as a means of social negotiation.
As the performance continued, Betül revealed a further focus. The honing in on the specific term that makes up the performance’s title: the “quotidian”. “An unpacking of the term ‘Quotidian’, and how we all react differently to it…”. With an acute awareness of Betül’s work and the questions she returns to, the core of this statement becomes clear. Can our languages, our mother tongues ever be considered “quotidian, everyday; daily”?
The lecture performance unfolded as a multivocal, sensory experience. Not just through the different voices and bodies of the performers, but with further additional visual and sonic elements: imagery, videos, sliding acetates, musical interludes, and layered echoes: melded together to create a homage to new and former homes, much in line with the wider programme this performance “had been situated within: ‘House Warming’.”
The basis for the lecture performance, previously published diary entries were read with gentle, rhythmic precision by Siwar, with Betül, Hanieh, and Alev taking these texts and transforming them into artistic material, treating the text as matter, in fact, as their host. Alev expanded upon the etymology of many of the turns of phrase, weaving between languages, that for some in the audience felt familiar, whilst for others, myself included, added unknown, sensorial layers. Hanieh responded with a new layer of diaristic entries and companion visuals, to add a sense of languages within languages, homes within homes, and familial lines and lineages in our daily vocabularies.
Betül’s response to the text as host was to invite repetition and structure, to catch the quotidian at play and emphasize, highlight, repeat, suggest, and remind us: no we did not quite grasp that correctly. Seemingly straightforward details, such as “to speak and be spoken to in Arabic in Amsterdam”, when repeated and given clear sonic resonance built an appreciation of this very specific use of language as matter, that as Betül beautifully stated in the performance: “translates into multilingual dialogue free from linearity”.
This multilingual language came not only from the different languages, vocabularies, and visual components entangled together but also a clear sense of the multivocal, collective action. Together, with the audience in tow, Siwar Kraytem, Betül Aksu, Alev Ersan, and Hanieh Fatouraee became witnesses to one another’s languages, one another’s letters, one another’s intimate diary entries, one another’s questions, and repetitions. A chorus of collective support that offered a sense of mutuality even through experiences of exclusion and estrangement.
To focus on the second part of the aforementioned line: “free from linearity” perhaps gives a false sense of lightness and fluidity. To think of the reverse of this “freedom”, we instead recognize precarity, the unknown, a feeling of being uprootedness. All of this connects to the weight of language as a confrontational and political tool introduced in Betül’s installation and performance series “Bureau of Commons”, which started in 2021.
A self-declared territory, made tangible through the use of a single blue plastic sheet, the Bureau of Commons authorizes its participants to collectively reflect upon the “Free Movement of Persons”, as defined and declared by the EU. This work, and its participatory format, took its form over three iterations. The first was in Zürich, as part of Betül’s School of Commons fellowship as part of the 2021-2022 cohort.
The second was hybridly facilitated physically at the Venice Biennale 2022, and the third was in Victoria Park in London, which turned into a solo performance, as no one became a participant, highlighting the lack of engagement in the topic by non-immigrants in the UK. Though the solo performance of the London iteration here seems the most politically telling, each iteration was backdropped with the political reality of the bureaucratic hurdles Betül was forced to follow in order to be present to host and facilitate the very work itself.
Betül’s work on official/human-made borders continued with her series ‘officialese’, which particularly focused on the use of language within official realms of border policies. officialese thus acted as an expanded artistic research project that looked at the ways in which official language became a tool to protect the status quo. It questioned how the languages we work within – knowingly and unknowingly – create systems of exclusion and violence. With one static passport to her name and a series of Visa applications that ensued from said passport, officialese saw Betül acquire an inventory of the official languages she encountered as a person on the move.
For one component of this expanded research project, Betül facilitated a digitally-mediated sound walk through the grounds of Taksim Gezi Park, Istanbul on an early April evening. Participants joined via Zoom, some familiar with the location, others gathering brief glimpses of visual information from Betül’s phone screen for the first time. Regardless of their context, participants collectively read and responded to selected extracts of Judith Butler’s “The Force of Non-Violence”, whilst immersing themselves in the sounds, noises, and coherent and incoherent language floating through Betül’s microphone, as she walked around in the multi-sensory rush hour.
The combination of a direct visual and sonic representation gave the setting of officialese, which had been until now understood mainly through bureaucratic systems, a wealth of sounds, noises, and visual backdrops that each acted as their own source of language. This showed not only the legal frameworks that a project such as officialese contends with but also the emotional and affective realities these directly translate into.
The same emotional and affective outcomes of faceless systems became an entangled part of the larger-scale exhibition and programme of “This is Not a Chance Encounter”, for which Betül was lead curator, in 2022. The show, which took place in Leicester UK, and online, was framed around the topic of ‘migration’. The reality of the situation was that the exhibition commission came about because, in the context of Leicester and this participant exhibition programme, Betül was considered an immigrant. Naturally, Betül’s response to this invitation and framework was a careful consideration of the danger of too loosely or too carelessly ‘using’ immigration stories (whether Betül’s own or others surrounding her) to make art from with too many potentials to make the immigrant a victim.
As a result, much like with the diaristic entries of “Still in my Quotidian”, the stories that Betül and the selected artists gathered and shared together became hosts for sharing experiences as art, and the basis for an eventual street exhibition. Using the streets of Leicester as both the canvas and the exhibition space, the exhibition, through Betül’s curatorial framing, showed the intrinsic implication of place and space with the immigration stories. The places and spaces one leaves, and the places and spaces one arrives at. Much more than a geographical location or a street name, these places and spaces are shaped through experience, context, and emotional and affective responses they conjure, all as multi-sensorial language trajectories. Through this exploration, the exhibition questioned what is considered an “immigration story”, what are the forms these stories take, and what is integral for us, as viewers, listeners, and witnesses, to receive, interact, and engage with these stories.
Since 2023, Betül has been building a new home to expand this sense of collectivity in her work, for which she continues to embody and expand the role of host. “sezon” which translates to season, nurtures the cyclical relationships and connections Betül engenders through her work and the relational questions that she asks. More tangibly, it is a hosting site for gathering, for exchange, and for the cultivation of knowledge production and circulation. sezon, located in Izmir (Turkey), hosts people who are interested in the politics and poetics of change, in the art world and beyond. In its first year of operation, it focused mainly on using the physical space to initiate gatherings as sites for exchange and understanding the embeddedness of knowledge within a specifically defined place and space.
As a physical space, sezon manifests as a concrete embodiment, a solid spatial extension of the practice Betül has been harvesting. A practice that challenges and contends with the politics and poetics of language, with texts as host, and the tangible and intangible tools in which we are able to express possibilities towards connection with place, space, estrangement, and belonging. Through a space as host, these considerations are able to take form through conversations, exhibitions, workshops, and gatherings, to seep into the walls and floors of the space, but to ensure they can be safely nurtured to extend outwards, too.
To circle back to Betül’s most recent performance, and that which began this text, much like the changing homes of the mother tongue presented, “Still in my Quotidian”, the performance lecture is a work that, too, is on the move. As part of its ongoing journey it will, at times, move to spaces where the languages in which it is performed do not feel estranged or alien, but instead rooted and familiar, whilst at others it will transform again to take on new connections to place and space.
Regardless of the changing setting, the voices will reverberate together in collectivity and in resonance to one another, asking us as audiences to witness, together, through systems, through language, and through experience (or lack of experience). To witness, connect, and exchange, as part of a support structure that can only be connected through the many: many voices, many bodies, many languages, many tongues.
When verse no longer feels free, when our circuits of movement are limited or even closed, collective action, collective exchange, acts of sharing, and mutuality are what enable spaces for the proposal and rehearsal of new realities. This, for me, is the essence of the words and works that make Betül’s practice – an attention to the role of hosting, a sensitivity towards the acts of carving and harvesting, of forging and maintaining metaphorical and now physical spaces that articulate crevices and cracks dedicated to the consideration and composition of our complexities.
