the shop for distant realities / ismi tuhafiyeci olmayan tuhafiye

koşuyolu Porsan (the shop where irrelevant things exist side by side / a secret tuhaf-iyeci; a tuhafiyeci which is not called a tuhafiyeci...); probably 1996... my niece hugging the almost scary weird sculpture who is hugging the air...

"My most important problem was destroying the lines of demarcation that separate what seems real from what seems fantastic."
— Gabriel García Márquez

back to writing and producing along with the bizarre waves of the fantastic, the weird, the ironic. and still craving for the better words. travelling between "tuhaf " and "fantastik" in TUrkish. but "ironic" does not serve the same purpose... "how ironic" - ironic is somehow more tangible. but "tuhaf" is more ambiguous. it is the summary of a particular way of perception and particular way of existence. tuhafiye. my parents for years have been running a shop where unrelated - far realities - exist side by side. this is actually called a "tuhafiye": the place who sells the weird. the weirdest of it all is their place was never called a "tuhafiye." but it got weirder each year... tuhafiye is the palace of shortcurcuits and of metaphors. where distant realities clash to create ghosts that go deep in one's psyche.

i guess my first attempt for an outdoor sculpture was in response to the weirdness of my families absurd shop. we placed it in front of the shop. as rain slowly washed it away; the figure got thinner... a pregnant lady was afraid of it. some loved it. some started to leave their books below it as if it were a tree. not to scare the pregnant lady anymore, we put it away...

all that remains of it is an absurd photograph...

moments of the weird / garip anlar

ev.k; uBAhn, vienna

i sit opposite the mother and the child

the mother takes out this thing. she opens the transparent plastic bag. lets it out.

a weird moment. the child trying to hold this torso. i look at the child's feet. the child has a second body. soft. except for the neck. wood instead of veins and blood.

something is happening at this moment.

cannot tell exactly what.

"dont undress my love
you might find a mannequin
dont undress the mannequin
you might find love.
shes long ago forgotten me.
hes trying on a new hat and looks more the coquette then ever.
she is a child and a mannequin and death.
i can't hate that.
she didnt do anything unusual.
I only wanted her to. "
— Charles Bukowski (Love is a Dog From Hell: Poems, 1974-1977)

"We see that in the organic world, to the same degree that reflection gets darker and weaker, grace grows ever more radiant and dominant. But just as two lines intersect on one side of a point, and after passing through infinity, suddenly come together again on the other side; or the image in a concave mirror suddenly reappears before us after drawing away into the infinite distance, so too, does grace return once perception, as it were, has traversed the infinite--such that it simultaneously appears the purest in human bodily structures that are either devoid of consciousness or which possess an infinite consciousness, such as in the jointed manikin or the god."
— Heinrich von Kleist (Selected Prose of Heinrich von Kleist)

"this, then, is how we first came across the fearsome secret history of turkey's mannequins."
— Orhan Pamuk (The Black Book)