MONOCULTURE | A Recent History

Kara-Kum is a sculpture of an oversized plastic carrier bag suspended from the ceiling. The work was made during the period when more feral forms of trans-national capitalism had spread after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It replicates an actual, normal-sized plastic bag like this found by Alptekin and Michael Morris in the Russian market of Ankara, sold as another product alongside other items like army surplus, caviar and toys. The plastic bag itself signifies a more consumerist culture – cheap goods became abundant in this period, and by evading regulations, renowned brands and their logos were freely pirated to create ‘fake’ alternatives. Kara-Kum might be even described as an original fake. The image on the bag is a variant on the logo for Camel cigarettes, a brand that uses Turkish tobacco and is based on a generic Orientalist image of a camel and a pyramid. The work also has the strange phrase “disposed in the Middle Asia”, presumably a mistranslation, and Karakum, which means black sand and also actually is the name of a desert in Turkmenistan. Mirroring capitalism’s blunt logic for appropriating symbols purely for their marketing potential, the artists highlight the awkward relationships between real and fake, product and place.