Esra Ersen

TURKEY/GERMANY, 1970

In her practice, Esra Ersen explores the transformations of individuals people and their codes of communication in the midst of local changes, and when exposed to other places. She works intimately with her subjects, who are often individually disconnected from general society, or form part of a subgroup whose members have created a sense of interrelatedness based on similar experiences. Such situations can result from shared difficulties, such as the process of acclimatization for immigrants, as seen in Ersen’s video If You Could Speak Swedish, in which a group is formed by the need to learn Swedish in order to gain state residency. While this work focuses on spoken language and translation as a form of rehabilitation and obtaining social acceptance, in her video Brothers and Sisters, the Black community of Istanbul struggles against a more amorphous form of cultural mistrust by the local population, bred from historical stereotyping and lack of exposure to other cultures. On the other hand, by the glue-sniffing habit that they resort to in order to mentally escape their poverty, the young men featured in Ersen’s work This is the Disney World have become misunderstood and disenfranchised by the locals. In all these examples, Ersen integrates herself into the group she is working with and earns the group’s trust in a way that allows her to translate specific local situations for a broader audience.

For the work I am Turkish, I am Honest, I am Diligent..., Ersen works with a clearly defined group—a class of schoolchildren. She introduces a Turkish school uniform to the class, so that each child’s daily habit of dress is reset within a different assigned structure. Adopting and wearing this alternative uniform creates a stronger bond between the classmates, as they share a new and specific experience, yet at the same time it separates them as a newly defined group from the other children studying in the same school. The project was initially developed in 1998 for a secondary school in Velen, Münsterland, in Germany, and adapted in 2002 for the 4th Kwangju Biennial in Korea. Ersen’s video follows the children in diary form over the course of a week to explore the cultural connotations that occur when an alien set of codes is introduced. During their experience of adopting a new look and, to some degree, a new cultural identity, the children were asked to describe their impressions of their new situation, and their responses were printed directly on the articles of clothing. The video diary and the school uniforms are exhibited together as a visible testament to how people and places can be connected, and how such experiences are interpreted by a wider audience.

November Paynter