Hale Tenger, Happens to the Heart, 2022
Silk and silk organza fabrics,microprocessor controlled sound and motor mechanism, tune extracted from Leonard Cohen's "Happens to the Heart" song, recorded by Serdar Ateser
Silk fabric cube size: 147 x 131 x 131 cm, Dimensions variable
The group exhibition “True Love Leaves No Traces,” in Istanbul, approaches hospitality as an intimate coexistence between bodies and beings. In the exhibition, Hale Tenger and Kostis Velonis, two prominent contemporary artists from Turkey and Greece, engage in an indirect dialogue on the traces of life and death.
...
The heart as an organ is here a metaphor for the throbbing of this physical body, undergoing change, assimilating, becoming sentient but also becoming other. “Happens to the Heart” (2022), a microprocessor-controlled sound installation by Turkish artist Hale, invites us to experience the living heart, invading the host and becoming alive in the process. The work is a structure floating up and down, composed of loose orange silk fabrics forming a cube, creating a vacuum effect, as if we were in the presence of this new heart, nestling in the rib cage, and the person is breathing out a sigh of relief at the improbable but amazing continuity of life. The rhythmic sound of the motor pulling up the silk pieces inside of the airy cube takes the place of a life support machine, animating the heart, transforming dead tissue into a living organism. Is this a miracle? In fact we’re dealing with very secular wonders, for as Nancy tells us, the wish for survival and immorality is an element in modernity’s program of mastery over nature.