5 Case Study 1 - Leicester Research Archive - University of Leicester

Stasi City… Stasi stands for Staatssicherheit… so that’s secret
service…in East Germany. Literally, when the wall came down, this
place was the embodiment of the political regime. So this place was
stormed. And what you actually see in this video installation at
SFMOMA is what’s left over.
Imagine you would be in jail… how does it actually feel? How does
it feel to be in an interrogation chamber? To see all these doors, to see
the recording devices, these old telephones, and to have this feeling
that this is really the past. It looks old, its already gone, fortunately its
gone, but at the same time it’s also something that you feel, well…
these regimes, these structures, these architectures of repression are
still existing everywhere; and hopefully, you also feel that eventually
these ideologies and these regimes have to come down have to fail.
So it’s a kind of hope. And the motive of hope is also what links it to
the second piece in this exhibition by a young Kurdish artist called
Fikret Atay. Now new generation… and operating from a completely
different part of the world… whereas before, there was East West in
terms of Socialist Capitalist, now it’s a town in the Kurdish part of
Turkey and its East West as opposed between the eastern world, the
Islam world and the western world, Christian world, if you want.
So imagine you are a young boy in a Kurdish city and you want to go
somewhere you want to go elsewhere possibly and you possibly also
want to get away form all these conflicts, you want to have a future
and let’s say you even want to be an artist. And you think… well…
how on earth can I make art in such an environment? How can you
still manifest your desire to do something to express yourself?
So here is this young boy that is recorded in one take on top of the
hill overlooking the city, which is his hometown, close to the Iraq
boarder and he takes what is available what he finds on the site: tin
cans, rubbish and he just makes that into some sort of a drum kit and
plays his piece. And he plays that very professionally so you think
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