Artguide

A winding corridor of backlit negatives glows with scenes of protest, grief and defiance. Faces emerge pale against a field of black; mourners beside coffins, crowds filling public squares, a child holding a sign marked Neden? (Why?). The images form a luminous post-mortem of Turkish unrest, guiding visitors through decades of political turbulence.

This is I Know People Like This III (1992) by Turkish artist Hale Tenger, a labyrinthine installation of 731 press photos printed on X ray film. The work compresses half a century of political violence in Turkey into a single spectral passage. Walking its length is like tracing a nation’s exposed nerve endings, history rendered as a diagnostic scan.

This monumental corridor of photographs forms the threshold to BORDERS / BORDERS, Tenger’s first ever museum survey, presented at the Art Gallery of Western Australia (AGWA). Born in İzmir in 1960, she came of age amid the political turbulence of the 1970s and the 1980 military coup d’état. Over more than three decades she has built immersive installations where sound, image and language invite audiences to feel the contradictions of violence and beauty, oppression and tenderness.

For the exhibition’s curator Rachel Ciesla, its timing feels urgent: “It feels like the right moment for a survey show… Even if the show was five years earlier it wouldn’t have resonated in the same way, which is saddening but also gives the show its power.”

Entering the exhibition from the intense maze of photographs, a quieter side room opens onto Where the Winds Rest (2007). The room hums with the oscillation of standing fans and a soundscape of fragmented voices, while the words “We didn’t pull the body from underwater” by Turkish poet Edip Cansever circle the walls. Created in the wake of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink’s assassination, the installation is a meditation on grief and complicity that resonates today as journalists continue to be targeted and killed in Palestine. “I love creating such spaces… magnetically pulling people in,” Tenger says.

In the following space, a modest timber hut stands encircled by high barbed-wire walls. Inside, faded postcards of sunlit Turkey line the walls while sentimental songs from Tenger’s childhood drift through the air. This is We didn’t go outside; We were always on the outside / We didn’t go inside; We were always on the inside (1995/2015), a work that extends the exhibition’s tension into physical form. At first it feels like a nostalgic refuge, but the wire and the music’s melancholy create a tightening sense of surveillance and entrapment. “That interior world… is always based on the exclusion of something or someone,” Ciesla observes. The piece captures the illusion of choice under authoritarian rule, showing how private space can become a prison even as it pretends to be home.