Nude
by Chus Martinez

Nude: a woman’s body trapped in a box. Is it a cage, or rather a safe, where no one can touch her? Two mirrors project out strangely, reflecting the female nude. She is holding up her beautiful hair with her hands in a suggestive pose. She seems to be by herself, unaware of what is happening outside. Wait! Her body is sectioned into three parts. Her legs, her torso, her head appear like fragments of a body. Who cut her up? Is it painful? Is she aware? It is maybe our gaze that is the issue. We might not be ready to see her body as she does, at ease, absorbed in her morning rituals, coming to terms with the day ahead… Yes, we are outside of her world. She is innocent. We are not. Our mental habits so deeply affect our social behaviour, our perception of gender, that we hurt the body with our thoughts. Luckily she doesn’t seem to know. She is a doll. Or is she? She seems to be real, a real woman, a youthful being, coming to life. Her calmness says: no context is inescapable, it only seems so in a moment of history, from the outside of innocence, but this box speaks about a secret, the secret hope it holds.

Untitled
by Anne Barlow

Füsun Onur’s Untitled was created for the 1977 Open Air Exhibition at Istanbul Archaeology Museums. Acting as a kind of intervention in the grounds of the museum, the work responded not to historic contexts or narratives but rather to the physical nature of the site itself. Using pieces of sandstone and earth, Onur emulated the patterns of the pathway, creating a ‘surface on a surface’ – in essence, another version of that reality. An embedded plant disrupted the layer of stones, its shape from certain perspectives resembling a small figure: an unlikely protagonist in balletic pose. As an ephemeral element of organic life whose form would inevitably change and deteriorate, its presence also introduced the dimension of time. An antique gilt frame defined the border of this composition, communicating that it was an artwork. Yet in being viewed from above, it created an experience of looking that was far from the typical gaze at artworks on a Museum or gallery wall. This was a construction that was clearly artificial: art, life and nature co-existed in this poetic, playful gesture.

Untitled (1977) reflected Onur’s increasing experimentation with forms in sculpture through her conceptual installations that began in the early to mid-1970s, as evidenced in the use of found or ready-made objects, and a shift away from more conventional sculptural materials. It also encapsulated elements of what would become key preoccupations for Onur in subsequent years, from her interest in the position of the viewer to her preoccupation with the relationship between image and frame, art and daily life, and the constructed and the real. As such, Untitled was a poignant precursor of what was to follow.

In the Beginning…
by Iwona Blazwick

If we try to imagine how freeform jazz might look as a work of art, the early geometric abstractions of Füsun Onur come to mind. Her hard-edged compositions are rhythmic improvisations in line and shape. Blocks of pure black jive with white voids. Like a saxophonist improvising on a single note, Onur elongates, repeats and doubles back on her rectangles and circles to release their vibrancy in forms that dance before our eyes. There is also something of nature invading the space of culture: solid monochromes split and fissure as if on geological lines; the Euclidean perfection of geometry is bent and fractured as if by some elemental force. The kinaesthetic movement of these black and white images gives equal valence to presence and absence, the seen and the invisible, silence and sound. Over the years, the graphic lines that once contained solids and voids escaped from the surfaces of Onur’s modestly scaled, minimalist compositions to embark on a series of adventures. They metamorphosed into the fibres of a textile or into a thread connecting found objects in poetic lines of association. The two-dimensional diagram walked out of the image and into real space and time to become an architectonic form. Intimations of rhythm and movement became fully fledged sound installations. These early works are, in a way, prototypes, the foundations of an epic journey that came to absorb a life and its histories into its gyrating geometries.

Counterpoint with Flower
by Sally Tallant

We are emerging from over a year of isolation and loss, due to the global pandemic. Processing and coming to terms with what we’ve experienced, we struggle to find a language to speak about the intolerable uncertainty and grief that we’re collectively facing, and it is art and artists that provide us with a way through.

So to enter a world drenched in blue light, a place filled with poetry, is a relief from the chaotic and confusing world we navigate. This magical, dreamlike place exists inside the silent and joyful world of
Füsun Onur’s Counterpoint with Flower (1982).

This installation punctures the everyday and offers shelter. We find ourselves immersed in a spatial and temporal experience. Imagine sitting in a volume of water or at the bottom of a pool holding your breath and taking a profoundly silent moment to listen and to experience a visual counterpoint. This calm environment creates a space for us to rest and make sense of the world. It transforms everyday materials into magic and poetry, tree branches and rocks into bright red flowers and leaves. The dreamlike scene seems to unfold in a hopeful, silent musical pause.

This work requires time. It rewards those who are open to the possibility of making and experiencing a new world – it is a gift to those who can allow themselves to experience it.

An Interior for an Interior
by H.G. Masters

Füsun Onur’s artistic practice and conceptual art are like distant relatives – we might not discern any resemblance at first. Her creations draw from things of daily life and their haptic evocations within us. An assembly of domestic objects, Dream of Old Furniture (1985) brings with it the materials – their appearance, their threads, their dust, their scent – of a home, and creates an uncanny space within the purported neutrality of the white cube. The dynamic is deliriously awkward – the objects are intensely familiar, but appear disturbed and dislocated. The pair of doll’s legs, draped with a strand of common lace, stands on a wooden pedestal, but the rest of the figure has vanished. The cover of an ungainly armchair is stitched and bunched like a figure in confinement. A family portrait appears embroidered on a tabletop, along with two larger busts and their five little loved ones, but the table is disassembled, lying on its side with a wooden leg next to it. On the other side of the room, a lectern has wrapped itself in blankets and a tasseled woven net, as if it is trying to disappear. These are odd objects, each seeming to be playing and simultaneously refusing a role in this domestic arrangement. There’s a surfeit of personality and absence of functionality. What Onur’s installation reminds us of, in the objects’ displacement into this carpet-less, evenly lit, temperature-controlled art venue, is that we inhabit our possessions to such an extent that we become inseparable from them. And they also remind us that the white cube is life’s mausoleum, shattering any illusions we might carry into the museum, just as any good member of the conceptual art family would.

Icons of Time
by Defne Ayas

Which structures should be stripped bare to allow the possibility for broader meaning? What reductions can possibly capture the shadows of relations, hierarchies and values, as well as represent the cracks and gaps of this fragile world? What psychic and social constructs correspond to the unequal conditions of visibility and suffering? What artifacts constitute the lens of love?

In this work, one can sense how Onur probes these questions. Hers is a proposal for the experience of art as the experience of the human condition. And to express this overarching quest, she embarks on the bold pursuit of questioning what constitutes physicality, lovingly replacing cold formalism with tender poetry. She pushes the constraints of form, masterfully assembling organic materials in an ecology of intimacy and care. As such, in Icons of Time (1990), she creates an achingly beautiful work in a timeless dialogue with light and space. In a curative to the weariness of it all, exploring and exposing the strained nature of our dance around the question of life, she reminds us of the outdated abstractions that we humans have become.

This Place
by Kevser Güler

Füsun Onur produced This Place in 1993 for the fourth and last of the group exhibitions A, B, C, D held from 1989–93. The exhibition, whose full title was 10 Artists 10 Works: D (1993) was realised in three different locations on Mim Kemal Öke Street in Maçka: No. 9 and No. 23, the site of the furniture shop Koleksiyon Mobilya, and No. 31, which hosts the Maçka Art Gallery. By distancing themselves from the use of traditional techniques and materials, the artists in the D edition of the exhibition series aimed to open a space for the then contemporary modes of production and expression such as installation, conceptual art and object art. In This Place, Onur explores the relationship of installation art with space. According to her, an installation is site-specific and proposes a spatial and temporal encounter that is possible only in the here and now. The work, which consists of a rusty metal plate with the word BURASI (THIS PLACE) written on it in red paint, questions the politics of sculpture’s traditional vertical relationship with space, highlighting its dialogue with the horizontal and existential conditions of space. Onur exhibited This Place, like a doormat, outside the store at No. 23. Here, it simultaneously points at Maçka, at Istanbul and at Turkey in the early 1990s, one of the dark periods of it history, and announces: ‘This is the place you have been searching for!’ The red paint also recalls the political graffiti of this period, marked by a violent crackdown on public space. By placing her writing on the floor rather than the wall, however, Onur transforms the image of propaganda into an image of bearing witness, of claiming responsibility and of action. The place where the subject, the action, the space and time can be reorganised, she suggests, is exactly where we are standing now; it is precisely ‘this place.’

The Dream of a Current
by Hera Büyüktaşcıyan

A flighty line advancing according to its own undulating rhythm reconstructs a current that has passed, drawing fragile yet imposingly flexible curves, suspended in purgatory between earth and sky.

This line that unites the visible and the invisible eternalises the moment between the water’s contact with the body and its evaporation, and categorically transforms the tangible and intangible borders of the venue, once a hammam, through the abstract language it builds.

The formal components of Those Who Have Washed Here (1994) have a temporary physicality, yet with its linear structure it is also a mediator that traces the invisible. Like washing and purifying, the perpetual act of erasing and redrawing creates an intertemporal space, opening up the form and the venue with a movement from the inside out.

By transforming semi-visible, ephemeral objects, Füsun Onur brings into being once again the spirit of the water fused into the heavens of the venue in the moment of purification. Thus, with the projection of this current that defies gravity, she determines the linear and intuitive kinetic effects of water on no longer existent bodies. By activating an unfinished dream with the notation of the crystals and the refined curves of this blue tulle that preserves the time within, she virtually recalls the stagnant history of the venue.

The confluence of the blue tulle and crystals fastened on the wall with golden chains induces their serene silences to speak. Like the symphonic echo of an audible silence touching constantly flowing time, it starts at an unexpected place, glides through the venue and fades away, blending into space.

Then and Now
by Gregory Volk

Füsun Onur made her renowned installation Let’s Meet at the Orient (1995) for the visionary 4th Istanbul
Biennial, ORIENT/ATION, curated by René Block, where it was exhibited in the impressive Hagia Irene, an Eastern Orthodox church that dates to the fourth century. This ‘elemental and utopian’ (Onur’s term) work is as meaningful now as it was back then – perhaps even more so.

A sizable blue rubber balloon hanging overhead in a beaded net suggests a solitary party decoration, but also Earth seen from space – our gorgeous blue planet floating in the universe. Onur excels at imbuing commonplace objects and materials with driving ideas, and at giving them surprising connotations. An embroidery hoop dangles below; draped over it is a somewhat ragged silk swath, shaped like all the continents but without countries and borders – perhaps Earth as it was 200 million years ago before humans. It is the artist’s vision of a holistic world that has transcended virulent nationalism and endless conflicts. On the floor is a copper washtub filled with water. In raised brass letters on its bottom are the names of countries, as if they’ve fallen here to be cleansed.

Deftly combining diverse objects into an enthralling whole, Onur’s installation hints at huge world-shaping forces, including the formation of continents; domestic activities like washing and embroidery; the divisions and borders that we, as humans, have imposed on the world, and what it might be like to be freed from them. Her installation of twenty-seven years ago is still uncannily relevant now, with a pandemic requiring global cooperation, not antagonism and strife.

An Interdisciplinary Lesson
by Leyla Gediz

Cadence (1995) has left reflections in my mind like the shards of a shattered mirror. When it caught my eye in the 1990s, my twenty-year old self could see that it was no cute or playful work, but nor was it a stern critique of the institution. The artist had pinned a note to the work, saying that she wished us to ‘hear’ it.

I remember trying to solve the work’s relationship with its title. Perhaps the romantic connotations of the word were equivalent to the pieces of tulle, illuminated with a theatrical colour, gently covering the freestanding ashtray. There was a tension between the wooden stools of the art gallery, and the metal rods reclining on them – the mechanisms used for hanging paintings. One could hardly say that Onur took pleasure from the plain gallery stools. They simply served as a sort of pedestal, just as the tiled gallery space resembling a checkered page constituted a background. The focal point was the picture hanging rods and their hooks.

Cadence deconstructed and alienated these mechanisms for the display of paintings to such an extent that they no longer contributed anything. So was the word ‘cadence,’ which means the close of a musical phrase, alluding to the death of painting? I think not. Onur’s issue is not with painting, but with the elements that discipline it. It is difficult for the painting to breathe in such formal conditions. The fact that this critique came from a sculptor and not a painter indicates that profound lessons for painters are hidden in fields like sculpture, dance, music, theatre and film.

A Point in Füsun Onur’s Visual Coordinates: Opus I
by Necmi Sönmez

An artist who builds tightly knit formal relationships between her life and her art, which have each taken root in the other, Füsun Onur has a privileged position in contemporary Turkish art. One of the sharpest curves of her long and solitary art adventure was her site-specific installation titled Opus I (1999), which was shown at the 6th Istanbul Biennial, curated by Paolo Colombo. The abstract images we encounter in this work, displayed on the second floor of Hagia Irene Church, were shaped using materials that refer to Onur’s own world of mythology. Although they have a tantalising simplicity and essentiality, it is not possible to comprehend their qualities immediately, since they are based on subtle references. In Onur’s own words: ‘The artist builds a multilayered structure by processing it with his/her own inner dynamics, by responding to it and passing it through a complex filter. Yet, to its audience it might seem as simple as if it happened at the drop of a hat.’.

This site-specific installation made with ribbon shaped forms, bric-a-brac, gold-coloured cloth bows, glasses and tulle, whispers into the viewer’s ear while taking the risk of disappearing in the enormity of the venue. This approach, which can be likened to musical abstraction, heralds Onur’s post-2000 period, when she began to explore the relationship between sound and vision by concentrating on the constitutive elements of classical music.

Prelude
by Prof Dr Tolga Tüzün

Füsun Onur is ‘thinking music.’ She perceives music not as some ‘thing’ that one listens to or thinks about, but as a state of thinking, a state of being; she talks about ‘silent music.’ When you remove the sound, that is, the fundamental object of music, from the equation, you are left with structure, space and form. These are what Füsun Onur is working with in Prelude (2000), as well as with intensities, textures, abundances, distances. When it comes to art, such concepts, which are essentially the determining aspects of every human endeavour, facilitate transitivity from one branch to another, allowing for breaches of the perimeter.

Historically, ‘prelude’ is the name given to a short introductory musical piece that precedes the main work, with which it is sometimes closely, sometimes remotely linked. That is, a prelude is a precursor; it points at that which will follow. Nineteenth century Romantism, especially Chopin, broke this historical unity, deactivating the prelude’s role of introduction. Henceforth, this musical form stood on its own legs without being the prelude to that which will follow.

Füsun Onur’s Prelude conveys this historicity and takes it even further. The technical terms she uses in the work’s description – motif, passage, small forms, expanded forms, themes, variations, duplications, counterpoints, repercussions etc. – are terms that we use in explaining the form known as fugue in music. Prelude can also be read as a modular spatial fugue in terms of the objects’ rhythmic relationships
in space.

Can Prelude be its own precursor? Such a self-contained prelude/fugue underlines the fact that Onur is thinking ‘music’ and not ‘about music.’

2001
Opus II – Fantasia
by Deniz Gül

Inside a room, it is only possible to imagine the whirlwind, the hurricane or the storm, yet the flow can be felt. The most sensitive part of a person’s skin, for instance, her neck, lower back, fingertips contact an invisible yet sensed stream of air. The work (the breeze)* on the window-door axis hits manifold surfaces, is swallowed by volumes. In the meantime, the person is a nod in the room, a multiplier.

The force is too disturbed to warrant condensation. Let us then imagine the escalation of gaps, directions and waves. Some queer flow! We deduce that we are still inside a room merely through the objects that keep us here and now, then and there.

Füsun Onur’s work titled Opus II – Fantasia: strings clumped up with gold thread, knitting needles, porcelain figures girded up for baroque or perhaps rococo, venturing pedestals… A setting clustered with various units and repetitions, stratified with sensory deviations and differences hardly discernible to the eye, wherein the waves fluidise the space. An assemblage whose creation inclines from material to incorporeality and will not be encapsulated in forms evoked by the words, system or construction, likewise the objects Füsun installs across the flows she has unpacked in time conjures multiple moves that are at times vectoral and at others cyclic.

The name of this experience is Opus, that is, work (breeze): the manifestation without beginning or end that comprises the making of the artist. The traced can be sought in the assortment of the acts of partition and multiplication. On the other hand, the movement that traces Füsun Onur’s work pertains to how the artist observes the gaps. Through their dispositional in situ (not alluding to any circumstance even if at rest), the objects – needles, pedestals – draw out ventilation spaces within the room. We are nearby the floor. The oscillations conceived in the mind through the absence of situs, which might be traced as deviations from gravity, can be read as waves mobilising the flow pervading the room. Meanwhile, in the visible space, there is an expedition to difference and repetition, to infinitesimals.

*The author points to the homonym root of the Turkish words ‘eser’ (work) and ‘esinti’ (breeze).

Flamboyant
by Anna Boghiguian

It is difficult to write about an artist whose work I’ve never actually seen, except virtually. Füsun and I are roughly from the same generation, and when we studied art, the art world was conservative, male-dominated both in the Middle East and elsewhere. Even in New York City, only one or two female artists were promoted.

I happened to visit Istanbul in the 1960s and eventually I travelled all over Turkey, where there was no organised art world in general. There were neither female artists nor international exhibitions like today’s Istanbul Biennial. The ambiance, as in Egypt, was traditional, although there was a movement towards Abstract Expressionism in Cairo, as well as an abstractionist trend in sculpture. However, Füsun was lucky enough to get a Fulbright Scholarship and go to the US to study sculpture. In 1967, she graduated from the Maryland Institute College of Art and at that period she started using dumped and discarded everyday objects in her works. Over time, these found objects began to dominate her sculptures, some of which were shown in the gardens of Dolmabahçe Palace and the Archaeology Museums.

Space, time and light worked together to create her minimal compositions, but at the same time, her strong statements resisted conventional norms. For example, in Icons of Time (1990), she uses materials like wood and skin. The mass is weightless and vibrant; light passes through the skin, suggesting violence, the breaking up of social, political and economic systems, the cruelty of the world. There is also a sense of light, transparency and space as immortal or infinite. These frames suggest that Füsun’s paintings have flowed like water out of the traditional frame, out of the accepted norms, and become three dimensional. Similarly in Flamboyant (2007), the frame contains not a painting, but a scarf, perhaps evoking protection from the wind or femininity. Both works demonstrate Füsun’s concise way of expressing herself using simple materials that say a lot about the world today.

radiant absence*
by Alev Ersan

A particular conviction I had until I was about eight was that it was quite possible to grow into a dog during puberty. I didn’t imagine what the specifics of this future might hold, since a part of me already identified with K, the middle-aged, black cocker spaniel I grew up with. I didn’t appear to the world in dog form, but this wasn’t a concern, because of the tight knots of attachment I had formed interiorly, my adoration for K, which sat within the realm of eros. That space of longing between human, child and animal was preserved and encouraged by imagination, since it wasn’t mirrored, nor reciprocated as expected. Instead, fuelled by obscurity and nonsense, it grew expansive, becoming a central motif in my creative vocabulary long after K’s death.

An attachment of this kind, once made, has an afterlife of its own. The reflexive pulse of mourning means that anima treads back and forth on the threads woven through the lifetime of the deceased – catching its paw now, showing a tip of a tail then – in some half-lit space, sending surprise tremors through the path of the lover-survivor-artist. The blown-up shadows of the scattered minutiae and the central, caught figures of Tekir (Old Persian tigra, Greek tigris) on the walls evoke such spheres of intimacy, longing and play. The five-piece installation stirs the viewer’s visceral memory through images of the momentary, familiar postures of the cat Tekir amid household textures. We remember what is lost through the way in which its absence resonates and tickles. In the silent, spectral rise and fall of the textile, the apostrophe becomes audible, not a composition in full, as explored in many of Onur’s silent, musical installations, but another kind of accumulation: twists and turns of limber, non-human spines and fragments of the human companion quietly humming the impossibility of mourning, an impossibility in translation.

*Anne Carson, Eros The Bittersweet: An Essay, (1986 Princeton University Press), 37.

Whisper
by Misal Adnan Yıldız

Meeting audiences for the first time in 2010 at Port Izmir 2: International Triennial of Contemporary Art, titled Silence_Storm, the installation Whisper (2010) is comprised of seven pieces lined up in succession. It is as if a wooden stool or coffee table is being gradually reduced from its original design and abstracted into a visual poem that I look at and imagine the flow of water, the rhythm of the sea, the sound of the waves.

A whisper is the lowest frequency the human ear can hear; to whisper is to utter what you wish to be known, but do not wish to be its utterer. This word, which evokes the feeling of mystery, secrecy, intimacy and privacy, has a depth of meaning that is fitting for Füsun Onur’s installation. The elders say, ‘What two people know is no longer a secret.’ And this form, repeated seven times, is like the gradual diffusion of sound, of word, of utterance; like the undulating rings of water ever receding from the centre and disappearing.

Istanbulites know best how words and water travel.

Wherever it may be exhibited – the Tütün Deposu at Port Izmir, or the Antrepo building in the 12th Istanbul Biennial; the exhibition halls of Arter, or the terrace overlooking the Bosphorus in Onur’s home in Kuzguncuk – Whisper will titillate its viewers’ instinct to listen and hear. The sound of the poem within will never be silenced. The melody of this installation is a song with a refrain that will be forever echoed.

Flamenco
by Murat Alat

If we concur that every existing thing is in motion, we can say that every thing has a sound. In as much as every moving object vibrates, each material harbours many a sound at its core. Certain motions, such as the internal motion of a stone, are small-scale and very slow. The sounds emitted cannot be heard by the human ear. Other motions are mighty; their sounds pulsate throughout the human body like thunder, jarring every bone. What, then, happens to the sounds after the vibrations strike our body like a flash and leave? Where do these sounds congregate? The memory, which keeps a record of the world in motion, is a plate on which the sounds are engraved. But the sounds are not kept in an isolated state in the memory; they are entwined with other sensory particles, thoughts, states of mind. When you summon a sound, a whole universe comes along with it.

Füsun Onur’s Flamenco, which she produced in 2011, is a composition constructed from the latent sounds of objects. Some of these sounds are born from the momentary, minimal vibrations of objects. Others are memory-soaked high-frequency undulations, spilling over the depths of the viewer’s mind. Like notes on a stave, hammers, ribbons and wires line up side by side and form a composition. The execution of the composition, meanwhile, falls to the audience. Each viewer interprets what their eyes see through their own personal baggage, hearing all manner of sounds. Each execution is different and unique, since it is the performer’s own story. The sound of Flamenco (2011) does not echo off the walls of the exhibition hall; it fills the halls of the performer’s inner world, therefore it is inaudible to another performer. Trails open up at each note, pinning the past to the present, travelling through different bodies in different geographies; and on these trails, one comes across the stories and sounds of various objects, plants, animals, people. This orchestra, which at first you think will create a cacophony, gradually synchronises, achieving a humble harmony.

Flamenco loosely knots together the pieces of the material world discerned by the helpless organ called the eye, which is dominated by the despotic power systems that have laid siege to the world. With delicate touches, it arranges the vibrations whose hazy origins would take a lifetime to enumerate, and releases them back into the universe to be reinterpreted anew by those who seek a music to listen to in life.

On Füsun Onur’s Pink Boat
by Ayşe Erek

(I am watching the Pink Boat.) The other day, during one of our usual swims at daybreak, the coast guard approached our group of swimmers and told us, ‘It is forbidden to swim here. We are in international waters.’ I have spent a large part of my life looking at this sea, hearing of its past, dreaming about the geography where the Cyrillic alphabet – which I learned from the passing ships – was written, about Odessa and the Eastern Black Sea, about the Mediterranean and Gibraltar. It neither belonged here nor anywhere else: this sea belonged everywhere. As my father once said, it is an organic living being. The Pink Boat, which Onur dreamt of putting to sea in 1992, the year of the great fire on the Galata Bridge, revives the traces of that time when the Galata Bridge, along with its stories, broke away from Istanbul’s daily life. It recalls the traces of the decisions required in its aftermath, which somehow could not be taken, and of the waves and dilemmas. I am thinking about how this old structure by the sea has been ravaged and abandoned by a new ongoing urban renewal project, which I read of in the news this morning; about the century-old glass bottles, produced in long-gone workshops, that came from the bottom of the sea, which I heard of on the radio yesterday; and about the whisper forever oozing from above ground and underground. I am turning back to the Pink Boat. Unable to get away from the sea, it surrenders itself to the unexpected rhythms and oscillations of the waves; it changes colour with the light, becomes dark, glitters, falters, dances. Does it create a dark image? No. As Onur says, it is not nostalgic either. She does not like nostalgia. To me the Pink Boat evokes coolness and lightness, much like what Onur says about the sea she sees from her home in Kuzguncuk: a momentary sense of ease about the future. Life goes on with the unpredictable rhythms of the sea.