Choreographer Aydin Teker is looking for consequence and significance
Specific events within one’s lifetime exert such force that it becomes no longer possible to take for granted one’s habitual ways of doing things. The Gezi Uprising of June 2013, the most enormous wave of demonstrations and civil upheaval in the history of modern Turkey, was one such event that catapulted diverse groups and individuals from their isolation to the public realm where a sense of ‘public happiness’ prevailed.
Hannah Arendt describes ‘public happiness’ as the ‘treasure’ of revolutionary moments where a sense of possibility and potency prevail. Yet this treasure is fragile because it comes to being through action the consequences of which cannot be foreseen. Political action, for Arendt, is performance par excellence: it does not subscribe to means-ends rationality; it is an end in itself. In that regard, it is similar to a virtuoso performance where one enjoys acting for its own sake.
As the courses of action are irreversible and unpredictable, this ’treasure‘can get lost in the murk of history. Establishing a common world and carrying forth the legacy of revolutionary moments requires skilled ’pearl divers‘ who memorialise this ’lost treasure’ through stories, artworks, poetry, and historiography. And, for these to be able to appear, to be looked at and talked about in ways that matter, depends, of course, on the existence of spaces of appearances, which is precisely that which authoritarian regimes and tyrannies aim to eradicate.
The culture-creating spontaneity and the world-making dimensions of the uprising manifested the intertwinement of aesthetics and politics in such a way that no artistic programme in/for/about public spaces and no artworks with political pretensions could approximate. In this context, as part of ongoing research, I’ve been trying to understand how a group of artists is responding to or documenting the recent political developments in Turkey and how the experience of Gezi informed or transformed their practice – if it has done at all. Some self-declared performance artists conflated the performativity of political action with using the protest context as the backdrop to exhibit superficial understandings of performance art.
There are, of course, those artists who began to think differently, to process the political, psychic, and aesthetic challenges of our times. I consider Aydin Teker as one of them. Since her retirement from her post as the Chair of the Contemporary Dance Department of Mimar Sinan University of Fine Arts five years ago, Teker is living in the country side.