MONOCULTURE | A Recent History

Alptekin produced a series of works under the collective title Incident-S, which comprised a number of video works as well as text works that were embroidered onto used hotel bed sheets. The videos were each taken in different locations around the world and capture insignificant fragments of time. They depict rather mundane and incidental moments, often of the marginalised subject, such as a homeless person loitering outside the artist’s studio, a tree being trimmed, or pictures of missing persons as seen in the streets of Kosovo. These two video works Incident-S Ipanema and Incident-S Bombay share the motif of the sea, each photographed over a period of hours. Questioning the universality of experience, the videos use the everyday as kind of humanistic material, capturing different individuals living in their own microcosm.

These videos were presented in perhaps Alptekin’s most ambitious installation, titled Don’t Complain/Georgia on my Mind, which he created for the inaugural Turkish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2007. The videos were inserted into the rooms of a large wooden structure resembling a restaurant in Georgia that Alptekin once had the experience of visiting. The restaurant, as typical for the Caucasus region, was divided into private dining rooms, giving each group of diners a common experience of systematic privacy.

The set of embroidered bed sheets continue this reflection on the experience of the everyday, using a set of words generically related to any typical scenario. Alptekin would create titles for some series of works by using the word “Fact” along with a letter that would happen to recur in different words related to the same research, such as with the series H-Facts (Horses, Heroes…) or B-Facts (Bunker, Balkans…). Here, the capitalised “S” indicating the plural at the end each word is used, looking to emphasise the multiplicity of experience.