Damla Tamer  /  "Due to its nature, it only moves forward."

The text here, I wished, would not think of itself as distributing identity bit by bit, noun by noun to the creature we have at hand here that is the exhibition. The immediate issue that presented itself was what to do without this sort of text, apart from cherishing its absence as compensation. Therefore I turn, not for the first time, to the thing that I know of that can move forward and stay present simultaneously -it was about three years ago that I came across the plant in Vancouver, growing in a bush under a street lamp, and placed its stalk between my palms and rubbed them together.

Pisi pisi, it's called, an allusion to the sound used to call cats to oneself in Turkish. Many times I have stolen from it since then; each time, after bringing upon a formalization with its operations it has climbed out of my pockets, leaving them empty. Thus pisi pisi enters the picture again, the picture that is the gallery and the table and the sheet of letter size paper; it is not so that for the sake of proliferation I and you can exhaust the possibilities provided by it, as there are none to begin with in the field surrounding the encounter, only indeterminacies.

It is the encounter therefore that generates the contradictory operations of the works in the exhibition, contradiction not being due to ambiguity in a so-called methodology, nor to irony (which jumps from one supposed worldview to another and then back in two elegant strides), but to the very state of encounter, capable of accommodating both self-involvedness and world-involvedness within one unitary clumsy human experience.

Text by Damla Tamer

Damla Tamer

Born in Istanbul (Turkey), lives in Vancouver, BC. Damla Tamer has received her MFA in Fine Arts from the University of British Columbia in 2011. She teaches at UBC as well as at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design.