Aykan Safoglu
Off-White Tulips
Off-White Tulips is an intimate, meditative, and tender essay-film composed as a fictional exchange between Black gay writer James Baldwin and the artist, Aykan Safo?lu. The work is primarily structured around Magdalena J. Zaborowska’s scholarly reconstitution of Baldwin’s self-imposed exile in Istanbul, Ankara, and Bodrum between 1961 and 1971, as well as autobiographical notes and intimations gathered throughout the years. Safo?lu produced Off-White Tulips early on in his career when he was in the process of acquiring permanent residency in Germany. The work weaves archival photographs depicting Baldwin throughout his decade living in Turkey (which was as productive as it was strenuous) with portraits of the artist and his family, including some which document the country’s oil boom and its first national entry in the Eurovision competition. As the film progressively unfolds, a speculative filiation is formed between the two figures through historical anecdotes, visual juxtapositions, and poetic interventions, inviting the viewer to ponder on alternative modes of performing kinship and thinking about inheritance.
Aykan Safoglu is a Turkish-German artist whose works cultivate relationships among cultural, geographical, linguistic, and temporal boundaries. Through his work in multiple media—including film, photography, and performance—he conducts open-ended investigations into the formation and performance of cultural identities, intellectual labor, and alternative modes of kinship. Safo?lu adopts an idiosyncratic approach towards the archive that I believe should be distinguished for its ability to be driven by a desire to listen to and be in tune with queer counter-histories and narratives from the margins. His process has consistently revolved around contemplating, reworking, and challenging performance and literary practices of the Turkish and Euro-American avant-garde (Jean Genet, Ulay, James Baldwin); it is one of excavation built around the aesthetic references and individual trajectories being engaged with and commemorated. For the 2020 Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art, Safoglu mobilized his own position as an immigrant in Germany as well as years of scholarly research in the service of a haunting work, Zero Deficit (In Refusal), which exposes Germany’s complex relationship to Asia Minor at the turn of the twentieth century.