BREMEN.- Banu Çiçek Tülü uses sound as both a medium and a method to make things perceptible that often elude our ears, or for which hearing and listening are not are not always considered as reliable sources. As an artist and electronic music producer, Tülü concerns herself with the relationship between sounds and memories, in addition to the significance of sounds in the city, and in relation to our orientation. What environments would emerge if we started with sounds? What could we perceive when we listen with our entire body? Tülü focuses on the relationship between inside and outside, asking to what extent does one’s body become a non-human object as a result of a medical operation, and how do they interact in different rhythms through sound?
For her exhibition at the GAK, Tülü’s new work focuses on the (female) body. Her installation comprises large- format hand-knitted and hand-stitched works of the female body parts, as well as fabric veins integrated into a sculptural sound installation by which the artist transforms the exhibition space into an interior of the body. The fabric veins intertwine with the “veins” of loudspeaker cables, which control fleshy sonic sculptures that are reminiscent of fibromas (benign tumors caused by Endometriosis, for example) and distribute themselves throughout the exhibition room to form a hybrid, technical-organic structure. When approaching the sonic sculptures made from porous loofah and raw wool, one can hear different personal and fictitious stories, which tell of body changes, attributions, wounds, memories, and scars. These narratives are embedded within different tempos and harmonies, heartbeats, and drone elements that create a fleshy and fluid soundscape.
Based on Tanbur recordings (Tanbur being a Mesopotamian longneck lute), a 6 channel sound installation spreads itself throughout the space via speakers on ear level as well as subwoofers on the floor. Tanbur was largely deployed for healing purposes because of its proximity to the human voice. The bass and drone elements transmitted from the subwoofers enter the body of the audience, evoking the sensation that listening is also a bodily action. Enhanced by visual perception, Tülü shifts listening towards the inside of the body, emphasizing the physicality of listening while modulating the frequencies and tonality of the body’s interior.
Aural Flesh does not comply with linearity—neither narratively nor spatially. The exhibition invites the audience to take different directions and to realign themselves—to engage with the voices of the body, to enter into intimate relationships with their narrated perspectives, and above all to listen through the body.
Bodies are embedded in socio-political conditions, perspectives, and norms. What is considered a normative principle obscures the view of other contexts – for example, the male body, which is still considered the standard and, as such, consequently marginalizes female and other bodies in the healthcare system. However, all bodies are complex entities that become altered in many ways by technologies, politics, and emotions. The body that is read as female, for example, or that is read as migrant, in which violent memories live, is always a body that feels pain. In Aural Flesh, Banu Çiçek Tülü examines the possibilities of giving this pain a voice and of listening to it.
In the back of the exhibition space, an experimental video by Banu Çiçek follows the asynchronous exchange of thoughts and information between an author and cultural worker, as well as a feminist gynecologist, and a DJ- Producer who had to pause her career as a result of an endometriosis operation. The video circulates around women’s health, the precarious health conditions of migrant and BIPOC women in Germany, methods and research, personal histories as well as caring and healing processes.
Listening is a comprehensive practice that operates on many levels while simultaneously linked to the question: What are we listening to? The decision about what we perceive and what is pushed into the background has both phenomenological and political implications.
Throughout the duration of the exhibition, a series of talks and performances will take place as an extension of Tülü’s multimedia sound installation, which will focus on body, sound, and voice.
