kayıt-sızlık (indifference), 2024
Four-channel video and sound installation
Four-channel video and sound installation
Aybüke Sanuç & Zeynep Ayta
The current political order has intensified existing difficulties, coinciding with a gradual erosion of collective sensitivity. Despite constant exposure to political developments and repetitive discourses, society remains in a state of catatonia regarding actions that might challenge the status quo.
The kayıt-sızlık (indifference) project examines this condition of societal inertia through Hannah Arendt’s concept of “abandoned individuals.” In regimes where oppression prevails, Arendt argues, the silence surrounding political life stems from the disappearance of shared spaces and even shared temporalities that would allow individuals to reveal their social existence. The loss of the public sphere prevents the development of meaningful perspectives on the past, present, and future, producing a “mass human” left disoriented, unable to determine what to think or how to respond. Confined to an extremely restricted sphere of thought and action, this figure becomes an atomized individual concerned solely with biological needs and the bare continuity of life, both abandoned and abandoning.
The formation of social indifference, shaped through desperate actions driven by self-preservation instincts, is approached through the familiar directives “drop-cover-hold” embedded in collective memory. Drawing once again from Arendt’s ideas, a supposedly redemptive act of “waiting” is added to this sequence of gestures, which can be reduced to pure survival reflexes. The futile nature of these actions, taught for moments of helpless disaster, is reconstructed through screens that employ contrasting imagery, irony, and nostalgic representation.
Thanks are extended to Victoria Ardiles Ruesjas, Fatmasu Demirci, Onat Hafız, Murat Şengül, Emre Yavaş, and Neriman Polat for their support.