Banu Cennetoğlu’s presentation at the 2009 Venice Biennale, where she represented Türkiye alongside Ahmet Ögüt, consisted of six copies of her artist’s book, CATALOG 2009, that assembled 433 of the artist’s own photographs alongside 18 found images. Alluding to the publishing produced around exhibitions, CATALOG 2009 fulfils the other definitions inherent in its title, functioning both as a systematic set of groupings and a presentation of available items. In an interview with Michael C. Vazquez in Bidoun, the artist explained: “There aren’t any headlines or titles, just pages and pages of images, bound into a book. The paper is quite thin. And if you like anything in the catalog, there’s a little form on the table that you can mark with the code of the photograph that you like.” During the biennale, these images could be downloaded for free by typing the code into a website.
In its incisive literalism, CATALOG 2009 is an apt introduction to Cennetoğlu’s practice. By opposing metaphor, she provides openings through which the viewer must meet her work on its own terms. Engaging with the material conditions intrinsic to diverse media, she asks how the work can be a document of its own process, its own production.
Cennetoğlu is both an artist and organizer. This is most evident in her longest-running and most visible project, The List. Between 2006 and 2020, she made public the data compiled and updated annually by UNITED for Intercultural Action, an Amsterdam-based NGO, documenting the tens of thousands of “refugees, asylum seekers and migrants who have lost their lives within, or on the borders of Europe since 1993.” In collaborations with curators, art workers, and institutions that took myriad forms, from displays on billboards in Amsterdam to a sixty-four-page supplement in the Guardian.
In her home city of Istanbul, in the same year she began work on The List, Cennetoğlu founded BAS to facilitate access to an ongoing archive of artists’ books and printed material. During an interview with Özge Ersoy, Cennetoğlu began by addressing how the limit of the book is approached by each artist. She could have been speaking to the restless methods of her own practice when she asserted that “it is a type of production with a lot of diversity. Each work contains a unique approach.”
At the time of Cennetoğlu’s contribution to a group exhibition in Vancouver in 2023, my perception of her process focused on the mutability and multiplicity of the media she engaged. Made from helium-filled Mylar letter balloons akin to those that spell out messages of celebration, IKNOWVERYWELLBUTNEVERTHELESS (2015–ongoing) comprises a quote from the Lacanian psychoanalyst Octave Mannoni. In each location that it is installed, the untethered characters begin by spelling out the phrase where the wall meets the ceiling and, at a rate determined by local atmospheric conditions, slowly deflate throughout the duration of exhibition. The gaps that open up between the letters underscore the doubt inherent in the chosen quote.
Like his contemporary (and sometime critic) Frantz Fanon, Mannoni approached the study of French colonialism from a psychoanalytic perspective. In a 1964 article in Les Temps Modernes, regarding the function of belief and denial, Mannoni analyzed the following phrase: “je sais bien, mais quand-même” (I know very well, but nevertheless). Every time Cennetoğlu exhibits it, Mannoni’s quote is translated into the language of the place where it is presented.
Parallel to the ongoing presentations of IKNOWVERYWELLBUTNEVERTHELESS, Cennetoğlu has produced right? (2022–ongoing). Each iteration of the work gathers all the letters required to spell out a selection from the thirty articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the same helium-filled Mylar balloons. Bound together into a bouquet and anchored to the ground, the density of these alphabetic assemblages makes them impossible to decipher. The title asks two questions. First, are these articles we encounter actual rights to be believed, administered, enforced? Second, are these correct—do you agree?
It would be easy to project onto right? a metaphorical meaning—the articles adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948 are right now in the process of collapsing—but this would be incorrect. Non-binding and not enforced, these articles have instead served as mythologies that nations tell their citizens with their selective application, consolidating rather than critiquing power. Consider that these edicts were adopted by the United Nations General Assembly the same year as the Nakba. Article 9 from the exhibition of right? at the 58th Carnegie International in 2022 proclaims: “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.”
If IKNOWVERYWELLBUTNEVERTHELESS can be considered a score in the Fluxus tradition—which the artist has cited as an influence—to be executed on an ongoing basis, right? is decidedly finite. Every invitation for presentation entails articles from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights presented one time only in numerical order, until all thirty of the declarations in this single-edition work have been expended.
The inherent impermanence of those two works is the opposite of Gurbet’s Diary (27.07.1995–08.10.1997) (2016–17). Originally a chemist, Gurbetelli Ersöz was arrested in 1990 for supporting the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and, after two years in prison, became the first woman to be editor-in-chief of the Kurdish newspaper Özgür Gündem until her arrest in early 1994. Forbidden to work as a journalist, she took up arms for the PKK upon her release the following year. Ersöz’s diary ends just prior to her death in combat in 1997.
First published in 1998, by Mezopotamien Verlag in Germany, the diary was available for only two years in Türkiye, during the peace talks between the national government and the PKK from 2013 until 2015. Negar Azimi has pointed out that the diary was not only an act of autobiography, but also just one document from a collective struggle: “Fighters are encouraged to keep journals—an act of resistance, a defiant trace of history writing when yours is endlessly rewritten, erased.”
In conversation with Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, Cennetoğlu stated that the initial proposal of Gurbet’s Diary was for the entire book to be published in daily installments in two newspapers—one in Greece, the other in Germany—over the course of Documenta 14, for which the work was commissioned. When this proved impossible, the artist instead arranged to have the whole diary inscribed onto 145 press-ready lithographic stones with the potential to yield unlimited editions. Since Gurbet’s Diary was acquired by Le Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne in 2022, Cennetoğlu has collaborated with publishers outside the contemporary art context to make editions of Ersöz’s text available in additional languages. This began with a French translation published by Les éditions d’en bas in Lausanne in 2023 and a Greek translation published by Agra Publications in Athens earlier this year.
If the “defiant trace” of Gurbet’s Diary looked ahead then with False Witness (2003–24) Cennetoğlu has reached into her own past to transmute an extant work into another kind of practical form. At the time of writing, False Witness brackets Cennetoğlu’s exhibition history: first as an artist’s book at her solo exhibition which concluded her time as a resident at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, and now as a briquette in the recent survey of her practice at Kunsthal Charlottenborg.
False Witness, like CATALOG 2009, consists primarily of Cennetoğlu’s photographs. This includes images whose production spans several years but primarily consists of views of the registration center for asylum seekers in Ter Apel in the Netherlands. Access was facilitated by a research request, and her photos eschewed the presence of people being judged for entry to focus on the ideology manifested in the architecture itself. Last year, a long-term and labor-intensive process of pulping took place for the remaining 360 copies of False Witness from the original edition of 1,000. Their pages were soaked and shredded along with the pre-softened spines before being shaped using a manual clamping press and then allowed to dry into the final hand-held forms. False Witness is a revision—a seeing-again. What are we left with? Future fires.
