VOID, 2022
One day, I saw a notice for the missing cat of one of our neighbours on the entrance door of our building. I am almost sure that, the owners who posted the notice are foreigners, because the notice was bilingual (in English and Turkish) and “missing” was translated into Turkish as “eksik”, likely through Google Translate which was not correct from the Turkish vocabulary point of view. Then the word was scratched out by someone pragmatic, and it was corrected as “kayıp”.
This very naïve confusion made me to think about the two words; “eksik” and “kayıp”. Though they are much related with each other, “kayıp” in Turkish expresses the situation of being lost, absence, whereas “eksik” evokes a sense of incompleteness and insufficiency after you lose somebody or something valuable. Then I started to think about the relation, sometimes the tension between these two interwoven words, and they triggered my thoughts through around death. Is it a complete disappearance, how can we describe the void inside us when we lose somebody, who is actually lost; the dead or the left behind?
This project is about these floating ideas in my mind. That’s all.