When Turkish artist Özlem Sulak, now based in Hanover and Bremen, came to Germany in 2006 she soon realized that her upcoming work had to be based on her experience of what it means to be Turkish in Germany. Having started out in Turkey revisiting the biography of her own family in order to depict the poignancy of 20^th century political and social history, she now started out to extend her frame to the interactions between Western and Turkish history. Her work embraces the personal and political in subtle and equal measures, meaning that all of her filmic works and installations articulate personal perspective and represent public discourse while asserting their elemental reciprocity.

Almost 30 years ago, on September 12, 1980, a right-wing military coup d’état led by General Kenan Evren took state power in Turkey, established martial law, abolished political parties and trade unions and abolished democratic rights. Coming after nearly a decade of social and political conflicts often bordering on civil war, the coup unleashed a wave of repression against working class and left-wing opponents of the Turkish regime. Up to the present, life in Turkey is measured by “before” and “after” the coup when talking about politics, music, art or literature. For her newest video installation September 12, Sulak traveled to six Turkish cities, to four towns and two villages in order to interview a wide spectrum of people who describe what they were doing the day before the coup and what happened on the morning of the coup. The 12 projections of long, stable shots range from two to seven minutes are shot on HD. Each shot frames one person in a centralized composition showing them in a contemplative act through which they recreate the memories of the time. Dilsaz, a left-wing nurse, talks about how she expected a coup from the left, and how she soon became totally disenchanted that no opposition was shown; an old lady, Emine, gives a very personal account, still not knowing now today what really happened; a former arms dealer, Muharrem, tells how he lost his job after the coup; and Mustafa, a left-wing radical, speaks about his long time in custody, reminding us on the fact that during the putsch, one could be imprisoned for up to 90 days without being charged for a crime.

The singular and very important aspect all interviewees refer to is that they hid their books during the time of the coup d’état. In a subtle way, this serves as an indication of the severity of the event: 650,000 people were arrested, 230,000 of those were prosecuted. Seven thousand of these faced capital punishment. Fifty of them were hung. Another 300 died in unknown circumstances. Another 171 died of torture, while another 300 died in jails. 14,000 were expatriated. 30.000 immigrated to other countries as political refugees. About 40,000 kg of books and magazines were burnt. Some of these books are on show in the exhibition space. Except from progressive Turkish writers like Nazım Hikmet and Aziz Nesin, Marx’s Capital was banned as well as the writings of Salinger, Orwell, Tolstoy, Hesse, and Sartre. Somehow these events seem to be written out of history.
The personal accounts range across the spectrum of society, giving the supporters as well as the opponents of the putsch their space to express what happened in these days. Sulak concentrates on the overwhelming intimacy of an individual experience of a singular belonging, which at large constitutes a fabric of history and its "grand narrative". There is a strong connection between narrative elements and her lived experience because self-referentiality is a compelling dimension of Sulak’s work. Özlem Sulak portrays the turmoil of history as perceived through a sequence of generations and events that revisit and reconsider paramount moments of history but also ordinary, insignificant and often forgotten local cases of private lives and their individual dramas. For her, what happened September 12 affected her family and formed her life. The Coup d'etat not only destroyed the entire opposition in Turkey and took away the basic liberties with its oppressive military constitution but also led to more than 20 years of silence. The biggest fear of the parents of that era who often got jailed was that their children would somehow get involved with politics. This meant that there would absolutely be no voicing of political opinion for the generations to come. And that was Sulak’s generation.
In a second step, Özlem Sulak goes beyond the situation in Turkey and combines it with the involvement in the West and especially today’s notion of what is happening in Turkey and whether this country should be admitted to the EU. In 2008, ARTE stated: “Turkey will become more liberal and more religious in the upcoming years.” This development is a direct outcome of September 12 and also of the Western involvement in the case. The military putsch was done with the help and the silent approval of many European countries and most significantly the CIA. Officially, the coup was necessary in order to rehabilitate the bankrupt economy and put an end to “chaos and anarchy,” something the parliament and government were incapable of doing. But the situation was far more complex. At the time, Turkish society was divided between supporters of a free market and a very strong leftist opposition. In the 1970s Turkey faced chronic economic, social and political instability. The nationalist policies of building up the country's economy isolated from the world market had manifestly failed. Successive governments attempted in vain to solve this problem by relying on more and more foreign loans. But this only gave Western creditors more leverage to press for “economic restructuring” and undermine national economic policies. In response, these measures brought the working class, which experienced explosive growth during the country's post-World-War II industrialization, into repeated clashes with the economic and political elite. Moreover, the recurrent economic crises radicalized large sections of the middle classes, including the peasantry, leading to the emergence of numerous leftist groups alongside a strong trade union movement. Faced with this situation, influential leaders of the military and MIT intelligence service, as well as conservative politicians such as Demirel, unleashed a systematic terror campaign to weaken left-wing organizations and pave the way for a coup. The West favored this path because of monetary and geo-strategic reasons; as a result, they also knowingly supported the introduction of a fundamentalist Islamism, a far more repressive state and the conflict with the Kurds and the Alevits. And, ironically, the military constitution of that time that remains almost unaltered to date revoked the former liberal and democratic laws that today are demanded by the European Union.
This installation is at first the proof that histories of human agency and aggression leave consequences, in this case a struggling and deeply divided Turkey. But at no point does the installation act as an accusation or take one specific side. The interpretations of September 12^th, 1980 are still controversial and Sulak leaves it that way. Sulak’s images communicate ideals, myths, histories, politics, criticism, ideas, and emotions. Through thoughtful selection and composition, through intense research of the context, Sulak exhibits a multifaceted documentary that searches for extended meanings. This method of judicious withholding encourages viewers to contemplate the reasons behind the fact of each image, making space for viewers to formulate their own sense of the situation portrayed.

Özlem Sulak, born 1979 in Kayseri
 (TR) lives and works at the Villa Minimo in Hanover (D). In recent years, she received the grant of the Kunstverein Hildesheim (2005), the grant of the Künstlerstätte Bleckede (2006) and the Villa Minimo grant (2008-10). She also has been awarded the fair: Play ’06 Video Festival Award (2006) and the Bremer Videokunstpreis (2008). Recently, she had a solo show at GAK Bremen (2009) and participated in group shows at ZKM Karlsruhe, Kunsthaus Graz and Platform Garanti in Istanbul.
For further information please contact the gallery.

Filmstill September 12