The exhibition, titled Zero Tolerance, came in one of those moments where Turkey is being shaken with the Kurdish question. While I am writing this review, there are hundreds of political activists in Turkish prisons who are on hunger strike for more than 60 days. Several Kurdish MP's began a support hunger strike. Every night is like a scream of widespread protests. All the region is agitated. The government seems generally provocative, neglectful at best. And under such circumstances, Özmen from Diyarbakir, the ‚Paris of Kurdistan’, shines with a new exhibition ironically titled ‚zero tolerance’. It is thus a unique opportunity both to evaluate Özmen's enduring art and the position of Kurdish contemporary art within all these events surrounding the Kurdish question.
The event includes many new works and some older videos like The Work (2005) and Honorarium (2009). Özmen's The Kefiyyeh Series (2012) immediately became the most popular of all; they were both loved by the audience and the media. The Kefiyyeh Series includes three works playing with the form of kefiyyeh. Although kefiyyeh (poşu in Turkish) is only an accessory, a headdress for men; „made from a diagonally folded square of cloth held in place by an agal wound around the head“, it is also a strong political symbol. Activists may hide their faces with kefiyyeh, Kurdish people enjoy using it a lot; as a result, a simple piece of cloth is not a simple piece of cloth any more but a sign of resistance. Recently a university student in Istanbul was arrested while waiting at the bus station just because he was wearing a kefiyyeh.
Özmen first made a handmade Kefiyyeh, (Perfect Kefiyyeh, 2012, c–print mounted on aluminium, 123x123) paying all the necessary attention to turn kefiyyeh into a delicate artwork. It requires a patient artist who paints like miniature. A persistent attempt to demand respect for the sign of a cultural insistence on keeping a difference alive and to demand a position of artistic protection for the symbolic value.
Özmen also tailored a handmade suit for himself, again using the form of kefiyyeh (The Kefiyyeh Armor, 2012.) He exhibits the suit (and shoes) just like they would be exhibited in a gallery of historical armors of medieval knights. Again, a gesture of ultimate protection. In the last work of the series, we see a photograph of Özmen himself, lying down on a couch, wearing the special suit he made from the form of kefiyyeh (The Optical Propaganda, 2012, c–print mounted on aluminium, 100x120 cm.) The way he lies down on the couch refers to several nude paintings in the history of painting, and displaces the biases about ‚macho Kurdish men’ with such a feminine posture. It is also an obvious reference to optical art, a subtle reference to the new emerging Kurdish modernism and its enthusiasm.
Özmen does not use political statements, nor does he make direct references to current political developments in the region, you cannot trace what is going on in Diyarbakır during the years following his art work. He loves to be personal, enjoys stressing the female power within Kurdish families, he loves irony, metaphors and jokes. Thus he exemplifies a new concept of the Kurdish bohemian, an artist who lives in big Kurdish cities, Diyarbakir for instance, ‚the capital’, who is lost in private problems, gender relations and chaotic modernism of the city, and yet, finds himself in the middle of political debates, references and symbols. He then finds an unprecedented way to relate himself to these social and political situations. So you do not find dramatic details, documented facts or a spark of political conscience. Instead you see an old–style modernist flaneur swimming in all these icons, signs and events. This new Kurdish subjectivity mocks everything but does not really aim to articulate the pain or resistance through irony. İrony is there to differentiate.
In that sense, the most striking work of the exhibition is, Özmen's new video titled What does an artist actually want? (2012, Video, 02’19’’). In this work, we see Özmen talking on a vast land (somewhere in Kurdistan) and talking passionately. But we can't hear anything because of the sound of planes, probably fighter aircraft.
Özmen also embodies a new bohemian artist living in an imaginative Paris. A periphery city, intermingled with its own problems and not late but delayed–modernism, which carries a peculiar harshness but is also open to promises. The artist is not only living in the streets of this actual city, he or she also lives in an imaginative Paris, supported by extreme use of internet and immense opportunities of travelling in the contemporary art world. The artist makes jokes about himself and his like who travel around the world coming from such unstable realities and ascribe extra meaning to artist's fees. His video, Honorarium 2009, shows him creating a fuss over a fee for an imaginary art event.
Özmen mostly plays with political words and phrases, he doesn't exactly feel stable enough to construct a political sentence through his works. Maybe this is another sign of the new bohemians of new modernisms...
So the answers he offers to the Kurdish question are not specific political answers but they are answers to the question about the next political Kurdish subjectivity. The ‚Kurd’ in Özmen's art is not just an oppressed person who resists in various ways including irony, but a subject of a new modernism, a new growing city and cultural renaissance, which needs its own current bohemians, up to date personal tragedies and passions. Özmen represents a moment where this passion shows itself as someone who talks but still can't articulate. This is why using only words and phrases works.
If we go back to his critical work, What does an artist actually want?, the answer maybe thought as: the artist actually wants a recognition of his/her uniqueness! In that sense, a highly modern request, but an actual one as well. A ‚perfect’ way to mix political fears, fear of everday violence in Kurdistan, personal fears of a Kurdish man surrounded by Kurdish women, and the fears of a Kurdish artist who is afraid of not being able to talk at some point, being the victim of zero tolerance one day and being silenced. This peculiar fear makes him speak and unable to be heard at the same time, as seen in What does an artist actually want?