Can Eren Kulahli
The artist: Cek is a self thought artist living in Istanbul, Turkey.
Artist’s Statement:
Very Unnecessary Objects By Cek
The Gehenna Collection
my jewelry is made up of junk.
pure junk.
materials good for nothing… found objects of no value. bits
and pieces of rejected, thrown away, trashed things that can only
be found in a junkyard.
junkyard though, is the most prominent museum of the modern
society, to my poor opinion.
these are worthless objects for sure. of no importance or
value…
however i admire them. i find a value in every rejected, out of
date object; let it be historical or aesthetical. i give them
some thought, some labor. i love them.
so i reshape and assemble them.
i turn them into raw materials of sculpture. so they become small
body sculptures… you can put them on.
the objects come in singles. rarely in couples. so they are one
and only. unique and personal.
Gehenna
infamous trash yard of Jerusalem… the hell in both worlds.
the south west valley of the old city just outside the city
walls, where everything wasted and damned were jammed into,
where the executions took place, where the dead bodies were
burnt for ever, where every living and dead thing felt rejected,
discarded, wasted and thrown away out of this world.
where fear, fire and and eternal punishment prevailed and the
souls suffered forever.
so almost every religion originated from the middle east, showed
gehenna as the actual example of hell on earth… still bearing
the confusion if gehenna is the real hell they mentioned or just
a demonstration of the afterlife redemption.
i don’t know.
what i am sure of is, every wasted object, every trash yard has
a cultural link to this origin, and has a soul that will suffer
forever, in the gehenna manner.
the only thing i can do is to forgive some of them, and name
them after gehenna.
Human Body
is disposable.
it can be saved and taken care of as long as it is politically
feasible, otherwise it is just a piece of trash, dead meat,
vulture food or soil mixture that only insects and worms pay
interest into.
just think of ninety percent of known human history occupied by
bloody wars, massacres, killings and slaughters performed
basically for political reasons.
of all the creatures that exist on the face of the earth, only
humans don=B4t know how to use and share sources logically, even
though logic is referred as a creation of man. but the rest of
nature has an upper logic, that works as a natural reflex rather
than remaining controversial.
so people dispose people. humans dispose human bodies all over
the place.
this must be the reason why individuals tend to decorate their
bodies. they make themselves different from the others, they try
to convey a message by their decorations… that they are worth
considering, asking for comprehension…that they are
indispensable.
i use disposable objects to make decorations, badges, symbols
and body sculptures for the sake of who think they are
indispensable.
that’s all i guess.
Cek