Breeze, 2011, 8’18’’
Istanbul Modern, Turquía. www.istanbulmodern.org
His video Breeze from 2011 is a mobile image project in the age of reproduction and the digital image. By using images of a documentary nature and the pixel-based structure of digital media, Memişoğlu creates a particular artistic language to unveil the social memory and reality of consumption in popular culture. While on the one hand he refers to Pop Art and especially Andy Warhol, on the other he treats the data he uses as reflexive materials pertaining to memory.
The title of the work alludes to a sea breeze or a land breeze. Throughout the video the duality of the wind embodies the conflict conceived between idealism and materialism and which virtually breathes itself.
Consisting in two parts, the video begins with iconic images of the past century, including Marilyn Monroe’s skirt-blowing scene in “The Seven Year Itch” (Billy Wilder, 1955), shots of the first manned moon landing taken by the Apollo 11 spacecraft, and archive images of violence relating to the collective memory. As a sharp contrast to all this, the sequence ends with an imaginary scenario. In the last scene, as we traverse recent political history, a breeze comes out from underground, presenting a figure that foreshadows the future and takes form from the boundless inspirations to come.
Sefer Memisoglu (1977) lives and works in Istanbul, his hometown and in Amsterdam. He graduated in Painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts at Marmara University. His works are based on the aesthetics of photography, sound, drawing and video. In his works, the image, which is concretized into an object, represents the information-object, a communication tool to convey information deriving from complex concepts. Questioning the rules of the “political,” the artist aims to show a reality that cannot be visualized, or a fourth dimension of reality. Memişoğlu uses both imaginary and real figures and his quests for expression generally find their answers in the fields of video and film.