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“Man’s difficulty with a high sky beyond this world, a sky that is highly desired and impossible to access...We are alienated, this is true, but not only because of our society. We were born alienated.”

(From the presentation of Tom Bishop and Raymond Federman, Samuel Beckett, Accompaniment-Le Dépeupler)

Doğu Özgün’s “Night Rehearsal” series focuses on strategies to reject and escape the identities constructed by micro and macro structures around race, gender, species and class-based categories. The struggle to escape from the “houses” referred by these power centers can be expressed as a state of alertness by developing animal instincts against the human centric world. These strategies are reconstructed in Özgün’s paintings based on the way they are seen as acts specific to the “natur e” of animals.

“The Flying Ones” series is based on dependent relationships and the desire to fly. It comes from the idea of the person -who believes he could fly but has not yet experienced it- assumes that it will cost him his dependencies. From the perspective of Lacanian psychoanalysis approach, the subject’s escape from these micro and macro power structures can be perceived as the resistance of the fragmented subject to enter into the symbolic order as the subject internalizes the cultural system and language through the transition to the symbolic order and thus its construction as a social subject begins. In this context, the struggle of the subject to resist the ‘Law of the Father’ and to enter into the linguistic and cultural system raises the question of whether one can open an “undefined”, ‘’limbo’’ space between the imaginary and symbolic order.1 This situation basically conveys the desire to return to the so-called ‘undifferentiated union’, where the fragmented/missing subject assumes endless peace and tranquility in the womb and assumes that it i s a whole. The return of the subject to the state before they are detached from this integrity is portrayed in front of our eyes with images depicting a vague, ambiguous borders between the categories of human and animals.

The artist’s desire to ‘break down’ the hierarchies, which are generally highlighted in the work of the race, gender, class and genre, is combined with a practice that can be seen as an attempt to upset the “hierarchy of the senses”, which is one of the grounds on which Western art history rises. It can be argued that in the history of Western art, a sense of ‘seeing’ is attributed to a privileged position as it is approached as a rational source of information about the representation of the outside world and its reflections on the sensation and perception of works of art. It can be said that the sense of smell is usually located at the bottom of this hierarchy of constructed senses. This is because the sense of smell can be seen as a threat to ocularcentric (eye-centric) discourse and practices due to its potential to trigger memory and emotions and its ability to refer to the unconscious. We witness an attempt to demolish the hierarchy of these senses, both by emphasizing the sense of “fragrance” in the fiction of the exhibition, and by positioning the “fragrance” as a medium. The scent of “white soap” diffused into the entire exhibition area and introduced into the circulation; the body of human and animal refers to the processes of decomposition and marginalization of the fragrance in the social system, which allows redrawing the boundaries between the primitive, untamed and the civilized.

1Bruce Fink (2016), A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique, trans: Özgür Öğütcen, İstanbul, Encore