The Times Before The Past

“The Times Before The Past” 2020, Installation, Video-Performance, 47’09’
Nejbir Erkol makes a hyper-realistic cake of a building in Nusaybin, whose façade was shot and which was not repaired or demolished, and brings it to the exhibition hall. Erkol's visually violent work constitutes a sequence shaped around the concepts of cake, share, means of distribution and the objective achievement of distribution. Displaying the reality of life in the border region, the performance also includes the traumatic effects of the principles of precariousness and vulnerability on households. The language of edible materials is an indicator of instantly changing situations and conditions.
The way she handles and transforms the memory space, which has been damaged in the conflict zone where she lives, offers us a different way of visual perception. A beautiful looking cake with sugar accompanies the memory string evoked by the space. Hansel and Gretel, the famous fairy tale of the Brothers Grimm, which has a universal quality, is worth analyzing in the context of the way Erkol handles the space she presents to the audience in the form of a cake made of sugar. Having a home, which forms the basis of the fairy tale, is one of the main issues addressed. Erkol conveys the traces of the past and the present with a structuralist narrative form by presenting this experience to the viewer in a form in which the appearance and content are completely different. She reflects us the inner world of the damaged, riddled house in the conflict zone with a softened, beautified, reduced in size and even covered with sweet food depiction of its re-existence. This form of experience, which is outside of conventional spatial productions, constitutes a dominant factor in the individual's search for "finding a place" at that moment, in the way they understand identity. By presenting this experience to the viewer in a form in which the form of appearance and content are completely different, it conveys the traces of the past and the present with a structuralist form of expression.


