We are all Chaostantinians living in Chaostantin

Gauguin had asked with quivering bold words, shouting from the middle of the canvas: “Who are we? Where do we come from? Where do we go to?”

Where do we go to?
My first encounter with the answer (of our century) was in the advertisements of a bank adorning the streets of Marburg. On the billboards, there was a young woman walking down the street with determination. Under the picture was this statement with the bank logo: “She knows where she’s going. We shall help her get there”.
Below were the interest rates in small letters.
Knowing the future.
Selling the future.
Who were they; those who predicted the eclipses before anyone?
They knew the future.
They “decided”.

Reagan, former president of an imperial power, the United States, used to consult his fortune-teller at the White House before ordering his troops-always in war in some place-to attack another country!
Regardless of how powerful you are, power is not a prophecy.
Those with power are addicted to prophecies.
Nevertheless, most notable predictors in our tales and myths are blind.
The less they see, the more we believe in them.

Who are we?
Man walked on the moon. Our satellites returned from the asteroids with stardust. We gave birth to the twin of Dolly the lamb, in a laboratory. While Descartes existed because he was thinking, Einstein told that those who space-travelled would return younger, and Yunus said that one should look within (himself) to find himself.

Nonetheless, since Socrates commanded “Know Thyself, we walked a long way, yet without much progress! We failed to get to “know” ourselves despite the futile efforts of so many writers, philosophers and imams.

Where do we come from
Darwin proved that chimpanzees belonged to our family-tree which we did not believe and when the “DNA”s proved it, we once again were taken aback. We worshiped our ancestors. We embraced them. We enabled and sustained our traditions on their account. We fought in their name. Then we learned that actually we all started our initial journey from Africa sometime around 60.000 years ago. We believed that we were made of soil and water. Now we know that just like all of us, everything existing in the universe, is made of stardust. They told us that we were products of the Big Bang and located us in an address on the Milky Way.

But now again “parallel universes” are the focus point of all physicists.

If you are bored by all these questions that have been capturing us for centuries trying to find an answer to “who we are “ and “where we came from”, I would gladly like to invite you to observe the world through Siir’s eyes and her paintings.

We, all of us are Chaostantinians living in Chaostantine Especially and at long last we started realizing in this century. What is real is uncertainty and change.

Siir’s paintings are sequences from the state of mind of a world capital which rejects the prophecy that “time” will cease to exist when it is captured one day, a capital losing itself in the plain but still complex density of the “moment”, resisting to yield after each new capture.


Gündüz Vassaf
At 9000 mt altitude
New York - Istanbul Flight