Zeyno Pekünlü’s “Perfect Loop”

Walking into the little storefront of DIANA, you feel the frustration build. A canvas screen, stretched diagonally across the space, greets you with various warnings: “loading,” “turning on,” “please wait.” Often accompanied by a graphic rendering of the act in question (a struggling bar slowly filling up, a circular motion, ellipses) these projected screens lead to a confusion that cannot easily be overcome. “Is the work not working?” you might ask the gallery assistant, who will tell you the work is working. And so, you wait, hoping for resolution and grappling with the possibility that this is it.

Mieke Bal once defined the condition of the migrant as one of waiting. Waiting for your papers, waiting to hear back from the endless bureaucracy of establishing oneself in a new country, waiting to grow roots, waiting for a phone call from home. In Zeyno Pekünlü’s purposefully sparse exhibition, the video work Perfect Loop (2024) offers up waiting as the temporal condition of living in the age of the render, the infinite scroll, and the demise of democracy, which seems to be imagined here as a passing phase, a loading page that will inevitably arrive at, if not utopia, then at least a sufferable status quo.

Zeyno Pekünlü is not a pessimist. An active organizer and teacher living in Istanbul, she has raised her voice and organized against ethnonationalism, censorship, and conflicts of interest in the arts. (Most recently, she took part in a forum titled “Where do we go from here? The Case of the 18th Istanbul Biennial,” a postmortem of the successful campaign by cultural workers against the appointment of Iwona Blazwick to curate the next edition.1) These activities might be taken as a sign of conviction that things can change for the better. And yet her work often captures the state of affairs with a deadpan simplicity that leaves me wondering. In another video titled Work (2019), not included in this exhibition, the artist sits across from a camera for an entire workday (545 minutes), reading (murmuring) and composing emails, to-do-lists, Facebook notifications, and other screen prompts alike, out loud. The relation between Work and Perfect Loop is complementary but uneasy—both operating in the realm of maintenance work, one actively, another, seemingly passively.

The artist also speaks of this work in terms of waiting: in the particular case of Turkey, for an election, for the election to be certified, for exiled or imprisoned friends to be returned to their various communities, and most of all, for the state of emergency that has consumed the country for at least the past decade—since the most recent dissolution of the peace process (with the Kurdish political movement) and a later failed coup-attempt from within the Islamist factions in Turkey—to pass. (It’s impossible to miss the parallels for a US audience: elections, incarceration, autocoups ...) These states of waiting feel crazed, if only because humans do not crash into a blue screen as a computer would under these circumstances (or perhaps we do, with the dissociative state of doom scrolling). No, we continue to do the stuff of daily life: go to work, raise the children, pay taxes, fall in and out of love, read the news, organize, resist as one can, and wait.

Sooner or later the vexing hypnosis induced by this screen gives way to a desire to move about in the small space. The endlessly varying sonic refrains that fill the space every now and then help to yank you out of it. All Her Sighs (2024) is a sound piece that clips every sigh and heave in the discography of Sezen Aksu, the most widely loved melancholy songwriter and singer in Turkey. A perfect accompaniment to the frustration of Perfect Loop, the soundscape seems to offer tools for dealing with the state of waiting by resetting and regulating the physical and psychological difficulties of breathing, of speaking, of remaining operational. Voluntary and involuntary, these sighs resonate as strongly out of their context as they do between lyrics by Aksu that evoke heartache, disappointment, missing, and waiting.

A final component of the exhibition consists of nine framed sheets of paper with a variety of marks (arrows, question marks, stars) suggestive of intellectual and physical movement. Based on the notes the artist took during organizing meetings and stripped of their text component, these framed pages are arranged in variations on an L shape—always one corner missing from the perfect quad. These pages feel like choreographic notations for waiting: follow the arrows back and forth and around, question everything, emphasize the contradictions. It could well be that these notations are the code, the underlying activity that evades the representative function of the warnings and renderings that are displayed on the central screen. They are minute, gestural, seemingly ineffectual, but perhaps the sum of their parts will eventually amount to something.