Queensland Art Gallery - Queensland Government

Emre Hüner
Panoptikon
The disjointed narrative of Emre Hüner’s Panoptikon 2005 is inspired by
the visual structure of the falname, an Ottoman literary genre which first
appeared in thirteenth-century Turkey. Falname were specially produced
and illustrated publications based on the sacred text of Islam, the Qur’an,
and were used for divinations and soothsaying by opening the book at
any page and ascribing meaning to what lay open. Like an encounter
with a random page, Panoptikon’s jewel-like video animations are
constructed from a personal archive of images that Hüner has built from
disparate sources. With its representations of humans, animals and plants
juxtaposed with tools, weaponry and machines, and set in amalgams of
scenes resembling Turkish miniatures bridging the ancient and modern,
the work allows us to observe hidden, forgotten and imagined histories.
Hüner’s title alludes to the eighteenth-century panopticon, or ‘all-seeing’
prison structure, designed by the social reformer Jeremy Bentham,
and later made infamous by philosopher Michel Foucault, who saw this
architectural model as a metaphor for broader ‘mechanisms of power’. 1
Bentham’s intention was to provide visual access to all prison cells from
a central observation tower. The possibility that the inmates might be
watched at any time, without knowing when, was meant to encourage
self-policing, a principle that Foucault argued could apply to any
disciplinary system, such as hospitals, factories and schools.
To inhabit this metaphor, the verticality of our bodies might be viewed
as the central observation tower of Bentham’s prison. Our perceptions
make us, at least to a certain extent, the centre of our own universe.
In Foucault’s writing on the panopticon, the individual prison cells
all facing the surveillance tower were ‘like so many cages, so many
theatres, in which the actor is alone, perfectly individualized and
constantly visible’. 2 In Hüner’s Panoptikon, the video animation also
becomes a window into an otherworldly realm, which we can observe
without being seen. By extension, we are invited to consider our world
as characterised by systems of surveillance and discipline.
Panoptikon’s sequences are like theatrically staged fables that
combine markers of extraordinary histories, as if an illustrated
manuscript of arcane knowledge had come to life. Mining the visual
language of Ottoman and Persian miniatures, as well as Chinese
and northern European painting, Panoptikon refigures events of
migration, trade, conquest, intellectual exchange, scientific discovery,
violence, philosophy, religion, political change, and art and culture.
While it might be appealing to interpret this work with reference to
contemporary Istanbul, which retains visible layers of these histories,
the work takes place in an unmoored speculative zone. Hüner’s
hand-drawn, digitised construction is faceted with traces, figments
and passings of the power of an empire — an approach to art that
seems logical when urban streets are proof that parallel histories
exist simultaneously. Chronometers tick through a liquid soundtrack,
keeping score of time.
Hüner’s interest in the psychical effects of contemporary life, steeped
in technology, is filtered through aesthetic, literary and philosophical
approaches. This work adopts the distinctive perspective of classical
Ottoman composition, in which mythologies, past narratives and future
speculations are contained within a single frame. He also mines the
illusionism of Western perspective, layering components from his
detailed tempera drawings on paper, some of which are reproduced
in his artist book Bent 003 2007. In Panoptikon, elements of this
idiosyncratic encyclopedia are combined and animated.
The thirteenth-century Arabic encyclopedia Acaib’ül Mahlukat (The
Wonders of Creation) by Zakariyya al-Kazvini is a key reference for Hüner.
Translated into Turkish by the fourteenth century and widely distributed,
it contained cosmology, zoology and botany, along with rich illustrations
of fantastical creatures. Hüner’s drawings of fecund flora — where the
squirting nectar of tulips fertilises the growth of strange organic forms
— reclaim architectural expanses decorated with Iznik tile, while chuffing
machines appear anachronistic, abandoned and functionless.
In another sequence, mysterious instruments or weapons lie scattered
on the ground as if cut from a vanitas painting. The tools of science,
medicine and alchemy are combined with the possibility of past
torture, the violence now dumb, a missed event. Masked and cloaked
figures tinker. Human bodies are shown in states of dissection, their
musculature, circulatory system and organs detailed in rich and
saturated colour. Elsewhere, the two coastal promontories of Pieter
Breughel’s Landscape with the fall of Icarus c.1558 is appropriated and
transformed into the site of a violent and extravagant battle. And in
the background of these dreamlike scenes, which are always enclosed
by a cage or a room, groups of figures look on, their understanding
limited to their own particular view.
Naomi Evans
Endnotes
1 Michel Foucault, originally published in Surveiller et Punir, 1975; Discipline and
Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan, Pantheon, New York, 1977.
2 Michel Foucault, ‘Panopticism’, in David M Kaplan, Readings in the Philosophy of
Technology, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Lanham, Maryland, 2004, p.359.
Emre Hüner
Turkey b.1977
Panoptikon (stills) 2005
Digital hand-drawn animation, single channel,
continuous loop, colour, sound, 11:18 minutes, ed. of 5 /
Images courtesy: The artist and Rodeo, Istanbul
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