Susie MacMurray: Strange Fruit

Akbank Sanat Arts Center is hosting Susie MacMurray with her exhibition Strange Fruit.

Curator Hasan Bülent Kahraman cites his evaluations on the exhibition:

The creation of art does not take place in a void. The essence of artistic creation is not about bringing something into existence out of nothing. Art has to do with the transformation of that which exists. Transformation is the founding element of authenticity. The thing that is transformed keeps its essence within. But is now different from its essence. It is new. It is original.

Art’s relationship with the ideological emerges at this point: the thematic trail and difference.

This is why the relationship established with the mythological is important. Mythologies are not “empty” narratives. Mythology is not a fairy tale. It is the ideological discourse of that day with its own unique texture. It contains the ideological. It points to the ideological. It produces the ideological.

Since the earliest known myths up to the present day the woman has always been a mythological/ideological being. As a being and as a concept, the woman has been our consciousness, our body, and our unconscious. She holds a reality beyond herself. She is some sort of “founding exteriority.” Thinking about and examining her as a being and a reality is to pursue and analyse “the beyond” and the “transcendent” aspects of oneself. The woman is dialectical.

But despite this dialectical character and her founding function, the woman has remained “strange.” She was considered “unusual.” She was deemed odd. She was regarded to be outlandish. She is still an outsider. She still has not been fully assimilated.

In Strange Fruit, Susie MacMurray steers towards the one that is outside while being in, that is still a stranger while being familiar. Setting out from the lyrical, the poetic, and the mythological she gives form to the real, the fictional and the image-based visuality. She re-establishes the mythological. In doing so, she renders her ideological critique of the mythological. Through the reality of art, she questions the limits of the woman and the metaphysics within which she exists. In the duality and dichotomy of art and woman, she examines the complementary and the lacking. These works, where the poetic is established as a metalanguage, contain nothing other than the aesthetical. As the utmost organising principle and the ethical plane, the inherent reality of the aesthetical carries the artwork towards the most appropriate form and content. While the aesthetical and the poetic become the most effective tools in rectifying the incorrect narratives, seizing this opportunity, MacMurray establishes a universal creation on the contexts of the woman, the body, performance and femininity, which diagonally cut through times and concepts. MacMurray’s works are a critique of and a contribution to history. And this approach is the most effective means of questioning the human being in and of itself.

The human being and the great unconscious, the human being and the collective unconscious, the human being and its myths, the human being and its reality: Strange Fruit!