TR

2016

Beyza Uçak explains her art practice as follows: “In my work I explore the role of graphic design in visual anthropology, employing multi- disciplinary techniques to communicate the (new) message. I juxtapose my ideas with design and culture history. Therefore my creative process involves an extensive research in a variety of media, film and sound recordings to analogue printing techniques. As I am highly interested in the possible ways of translation between different media, the methods I employ for a specific project varies from digital manipulation to metal engravings, aiming to identify the means of communication that relate to the proposed idea and argument with the consideration of the audience and its possible reflections.”

How did Imaginary Places series take its shape? Can we say that it is the series that imagination and tales formed by intertwining?

Imaginary places was a process to produce, it started as one thing, ended as another. I first constructed an archive of architectural and landscape images to research what is “sense of a place,” focusing on post structuralist thought. I let it sit, i didn’t even write on my findings. A year or so later, I was asked to produce work responding to “What happens during the translation between media?” Which made me rethink about the montage, collage or deconstruction again as inventing new associations between space and the events that “happen” through processes of defamiliarization, de-structuring, superimposition. Surely, there could be different rhythms and processes in the narrative (where is a place, how does it exist?), but there could also be methods and methodologies of constructing the space. The translation between printed page to screen, screen to etching plate, etching plate to paper. I guess the printing process -or “the loss” in this case, reinvents the story without an author. What’s lost is happily lost to “make space” for the new unknown.

Now of course , there is Superstudio’s Continuous Monument or Archigram’s systems in the 70s, a second wave of utopian architecture in Europe following the social utopias imagined in the 1920s, which by all means
could be historical reference points for Imaginary Places. Yet, with them, it is easy to fall into the trap of the failure of the liberal/leftist dream of successful political and cultural revolution. (It’s too late to think about socio-political utopia or dystopia at this point). My interest though, has shifted to imagined communities and their geographical needs to monumentalise and to actually make a space. It was easy then, to choose literally “imaginary places” for a subject. Anything else would construct a story other than the tale of construction itself. Thus I chose places that are off the planet Earth - if Earth exists in that story, as well as heavens and hells and places of the future, and literary pseudonyms for existing places. They are the unknown-new places you probably already visited, such as Aolio in The Odyssey by Homer or Nomeland in the Wizard of Oz, born from loss of data and desire to make space, I guess.

We see that you produce art works in very different fields in your artistic practice. For the Imaginary Places series why did you choose etching technique to materialize this imaginary places? Can you give information about your production process and your technique? Can you tell us the relationship between your technique and the context of this project?

I think we got into that relationship in the question above, so let’s move on: technically, all pre-digital printing techniques create a loss of information. If you look at it closely, it exists as a certain non-flexible size (unlike vectorial data). I find that fascinating, almost as much as pixels and atoms. Etching unlike screen printing -which is my foundation, allows the stencil to be flexible up until last moment. I like that. So I start with a stencil of my artwork as the photo processing requires, but I heat it up again and again, etching by hand to create depth, playing with light and shadows, as I print.

Beyza Uçak, imaginary places (2012),

photo exposure and etching on metal with 12 point caslon using letterpress

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