reviews haluk akakce
Haluk akakce
As with Haluk Akakçe’s previous
digital animations, it’s difficult to
The approach: london maintain a critical distance from
21 June – 29 July The Garden (2007). Akakçe holds
the viewer in a trance-like state
of suspended disbelief, as a cast
of creatures and strange objects from his imagination float across the screen in impeccably choreographed
manoeuvres. The Garden is pure digital theatre: a technical masterpiece designed to provoke awe and wonder.
It evokes the kind of alluring pre-postmodern nouns – beauty, poetry, utopia – with which the contemporary
artworld has a guilty relationship. How can anything this spectacular be meaningful in today’s mass-media
culture?
Akakçe has a keen sense of narrative, and the viewer here is carried through The Garden’s different
scenes by a succession of carefully contrived director’s tricks: the flipping of background from black to white
and back again; the recurrence of motifs viewed from changing perspectives; the evolution in soundtrack, from
haunting, melancholic piano to the solemn, sorrowful chorus of a requiem; the sweep of black columns across
the screen to mark the final curtain that seamlessly becomes the opening of the first scene.
If Akakçe makes liberal use of botanical forms – and even the more abstract shapes take on organic
characteristics – nothing is what it seems in this constantly mutating garden. A translucent rose spinning gently
in the black orbit of Akakçe’s galaxy has the voluptuousness of an inflatable techno-design object. A cross-
section of the rose becomes, fleetingly, a schematic, Picasso-like model of a woman’s head. A winged creature,
circling inquisitively around the flower, has the mythical grace of a swan princess, the crisp delicateness of an
origami bird and the wispy, trailing tentacles of a mysterious deep-sea organism. A forest of dead trees rains
slowly downwards, forming pencil-thin silhouettes across a monochrome ground to the sounds of lapping
waves. Two calligraphic sculptural elements perform a revolving ballet whose complexity and elegance is
enhanced by the exquisite play of their shadows and reflections. They seem to have come alive from a Miró
painting.
This narrative makes perfect sense in the hermetically sealed auditorium of the Approach: an alternative
reality of sublime, fragile beauty which effortlessly seduces its viewer to surrender any allegiance to the ugliness
and dissolution of the outside world. The Garden is a memorial to Akakçe’s friend Isabella Blow, whose signature
red lips in the rose-head colour the otherwise monochromatic film. But the piece resonates rather as a state of
mind than as a specific moment or location: a state of possibilities in his universe of boundless time and space,
an endlessly rejuvenating cycle of creation and destruction, a dream that believes in its own reality.
André Breton and his colleagues could only have hoped to materialise a surreal world so compellingly.
And yet, like the surrealists, Akakçe’s work needs to be wary of becoming a self-indulgent parody of itself, or of
losing its edge in luscious folly. With The Garden, one of his most successful works, Akakçe has shown that he
can negotiate the uneasy balance between spectacle and a different, more self-aware form of contemplation.
Jennifer Thatcher
The Garden, 2007,
video still. courtesy
the approach, london
Artreview 122
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