PRESENT FUTURE, TENT, ROTTERDAM / NETHERLANDS
FEBRUARY 22, 2009
MUSEUM OF NONPARTICIPATION (KARACHI), :MENTALKLINIK (ISTANBUL),
ZEYNEP TUL SUALP AKBAL (ISTANBUL)
MODERATOR: FATOS ÜSTEK

:mentalKLINIK between 1998-2004

:mentalKLINIK, with its “undisciplinable” state of mind, founds spaces of movement within the limits of art.

In the beginning :mentalKLINIK’s constructs problematized the relation between the work, its users and its participants. The question of consumption laid at its pivotal point.  and ssipration, which itere it is located. n and ssipration, which itere it is located. n We think that the relations between things and humans are exhausted;  locked in a world where everything is predetermined  with all the details. Experiences of today are transformed into statistics for a future-time. Their medians are calculated while all errors and surprises are left out. Human life is condensed into durational datas. Therefore no longer the same dynamic between the object and the subject retains. They are levelled both being treated as datas for future’s consumption. :mentalKLINIK  exposes interfaces of this transformation. First four projects, Sleep, Game, Copy and Self were prototypes questioning the processes of art-design-production-consumption previous to the final process of “data-fication”.

Since 2004,

:mentalKLINIK tags 21st century’s fragments with its own point of view. :mentalKLINIK, locates itself in the passage between two centuries. It slits open spaces between the material and the immaterial world, while being nurtured by emergent cultures and the changes between the centuries in forms of production and lifestyles.:mentalKLINIK creates encounters in its own microclimate and these encounters define the forms of the works.  It discusses value relations, it reduces senses and reflects augmented realities, it proposes joyful anxieties and it offers occupations. It designs unidentified spaces, indecisive zones and frozen times. Approaching the immaterial world, :mentalKLINIK keeps records of relations with materials. Archives its views upon objects and states as a “contents" project. Uses processes of creation, design, production and consumption as sources for its works. Names the objects as interfaces. :mentalKLINIK, shifts its view from the object to the back side of it. There, it finds the necessary inspiration. Not only considers technologies as gifts, but also produces forms of struggle aganist the given to overcome these techologies.:mentalKLINIK works on meeting the expectations of the day multiplying its identity as an artist. It mimics the overwhelming multiplication of Internet network.

In an era of passage from a world eagerly anticipating and expecting the future to a world where future is made, where the reality has new form, awareness constitutes the starting point for :mentalKLINIK. Today we are no longer able to envision a future, rather a future without hope occupies our here and now. Nicolas Bourriaud refers that contemporary artists work with possibilities of today but :mentalKLINIK moves beyond this. It assumes a retrospective point of view from the future melting the future in today.  

:mentalKLINIK defines a new space of action for the viewers who have become transient refugees in a frozen time as Z. Baumann would define. It exposes the side effects of a frozen time where present and future are merged. 

Today the relations of consumption define us as service-oriented subjects. We as subjects always have to compromise our subjectivity with the demands of the services offered. Life itself becomes a commodity offered as a service and immortality is transformed into subject-less sustainability. :mentalKLINIK deals with this shift from immortality to sustainability. It also deals with augmented reality.

The question of reality has always been a driving force for artists and :mentalKLINIK recognizes that the future defines today as an augmented reality. Augmented reality is an environment that includes both virtual reality and real-world elements at the threshold of future and present. In its works and constructs :mentalKLINIK deals with Augmented Reality because it shifts our perceptional relations. :mentalKLINIK wants to record Augmented Reality’s effects on our ways of seeing.

One of the fields where :mentalKLINIK directs its gaze is the emergent use of nanotechnology. While the ambiguity in areas of application created by its talented structure and its invisibility alters human perception and scales of reality, nanotechnology also transforms dreams of immortality into a presentation of a sustainable life. Nanotechnology, capable of making small scale suggestions unfamiliar to us about main issues such as security, health and raw material, presents itself as an essential agent in the physical and social transformation of Subjcets of the future. Even the political and economical rules just defined about it are uncertain. This dangerous but fertile world of nanotechnology evoking anxiety provokes :mentalKLINIK’s perspective and prompts it to think on and produce probabilities. What interests :mentalKLINIK is ofcourse the complex realm where the problematics of side effects and of a possible asthetics brought about by the transformation of materials merge.