Nermin Ülker’s exhibit entitled Windows is comprised of scenes she has contemplated related to her occupation. These forms that want to give us an outside view starting from an adventurous desire to look past the hospital’s closed and dark light. However, these scenes are only isolated ones, neither what she sees, nor what the audience sees have a figure. Without any figure or explanation; only forms in the process of developing... Even though they have not developed yet, adapted from the forms they are like ‘dream objects’ that are the origins of Nermin Ülker’s work.
Psychoanalyst Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, in his book titled Windows has written on the duality he has founded out between doors and windows:
“Doors are closed, doors have secrets and mystery behind them. As opposed to doors, windows are left open, they open to the outside. The eye looks out from here, sees the outside. Dreams stay open as their open forms. When words and images reach the eye that is starting to record what is happening outside, the meaning will start appearing. However, sometimes the meaning does not reveal itself, sometimes it is closed. Then, what is seen from windows start becoming abstract, although they are visible, when they are applied to sense wrong meanings could transpire.”
As Proust once wrote “best books were written with wrong meanings, as if they were written in a foreign language.” This way the meaning will start heading towards an external sense. Meanings that are open to an external world also have an abstract expansion similar to dreams. As they can be named windows, they also can be interpreted. We may call them “alive thoughts”. They open up to far distances. Distance makes images blurry. When images become blurry they become abstract, same as the lights that seep through the thick trees of a forest that create a beam and become visible. The light comes in from the outside. It lights up the inside and carries it from shadows to light, to colour.
A different kind of air comes in through windows that open out from dreams: An action, similar to someone opening their window because a doctor has advised “You need fresh air!” Air comes in and starts creating a breathable environment inside. But the air that comes in is not always oxygen that enables us to breathe, sometimes scents that are dangerous to our bodies, liquid, gas, chemical scents that harm the body more, will start causing damage. One of the most important problems for Spinoza, all that is stuck between immortality and death comes in from outside. Death could be come from outside the windows. But doesn’t life also come through the same place?
Just like the words that come from dreams, the air that comes in from windows will carry new meanings into closed in locations.
Doors are not open they are closed; windows on the other hand are open, just as a reminder. Very similar to a ‘nomad thought’ that stays put but travels, there are some who travel exactly where they are. Memories don’t need doors or windows either. Whereas the characters, the monads in Leibniz’s book entitled Monadology have no doors or windows. They get their light from inside themselves. Each Monad keeps his own little perception within himself and perceives the whole world with that little perception. Seems just like what Shabestari stated on sufism “the universe is a mirror, each atom has a burning sun. When one water droplet’s heart opens out comes hundreds of oceans”. In each and every light beam there exist endless mini particles, endlessly side by side, intermingled. Each monad keeps the other monads in the same essence, but their perceptions are not the same. The eye that looks out sees not the mirror but the particles and each person is capable of looking at different and the same particles. By this means they can be alike and become different. Like something that carries the multi colors of the rainbow and is made up of colors that carry multiplicity and colors that carry infinitésimal differences are perceived or not perceived by their nuances.
Each dream always belongs to the dreamer, it multiplies or lessens and becomes abstract once seen. One that looks through windows reaches visibility; looks at landscape. Eye sees the landscape and comprehends it. Hasn’t art history started with this eye that looks out the window? This is the heritage that Alberti has left us since the Renaissance. No matter how much we pretend to stay away from these issues of perspective, windows are our frames, they framing our gaze. But how far? Forms stop being figures and become far from us, when they gain meaning as forms and their visibility brings in their image.
The form of Nermin Ülker’s statues are also windows; they have been designed and formed as windows. But is it possible to know what we are looking at are windows? Is it possible to know? This can only be read as a nominalism. The windows are abstract windows as themselves. Her statues exactly are windows from every point of you. The windows in the dreams. Even if we around looking those windows, they give us different point of view. Every one of them have been named a window and we too will call them windows. As much as it’s a suggestion and a meaningful word itself.
Windows are forms that come from dreams.
Ali Akay