Do All Daddies Have Gray Suits?

The exhibition leg of the project reconstructs the story in a different discipline by transferring the visual elements of an experimental stage performance to the gallery environment. During the recalling and memory processes, the story places space in a dominant position as a founding component of collective memory. Memory not only remembers and reknits the past through what is remembered, it also reshapes what’s current. Therefore, it doesn’t merely consist of what’s happened in the past. 

In the story that constitutes the basis of the project, a girl, who lost her father to a murder when she was only two years old, is narrating the assassination, and the following stillness and the quietude that haunt the city since the murder. Does she remember the story that she narrates? Or, is she internalizing the story which was told to her, as if she experienced it herself, in order to complement a lacking piece of her childhood? 

From a point of view of a two year old girl, who sets her witnessing backwards depending on the documentary-wise images which helps her to define and support the issue – sometimes preferring to narrate through a primitive projection of language and therefore establishing an art lingo with the naiveté of a kid – story evolves into a political science fiction. Despite the fact that it is a real-life story, the narrative creates an atmosphere of a tale with surreal inputs. The intertwined and transitory language of cinema, physical performance, shadow theatre/puppets, and animation playfully enact the naiveté of a kid. 

The story narrates the upper town and the lower town. Little girl explores the lower town through a tunnel that opens up from a house in the upper town. She witnesses the new lives of people who have escaped to the lower town after the assassination. The story aims to support the lyric narration through Anatolia’s traditional languages such as shadow puppetry with the region’s own symbols and signifiers and incarnates Kemal Gökhan Gürses’s style. The narration of the story is essentially lyrical. 

Zilberman Gallery