A Painter of Multipli’city: Şiir Ozbilge
“And creating in fact, is always a mention about childhood”.
Jean Genet

Şiir Özbilge takes to the heart of her painting practice; the story of human being within time and space in terms of the present day and the city of Istanbul. She chooses as subject for her paintings the ever changing values, the desires, the destructions, the conflicts, the fears and the hopes of this “21st century world capital” Istanbul.

The main theme of the artist, revealed in aesthetics as her primary concern, is the city of Istanbul, or Kaostantin as she calls it. There are thousands of songs, folk songs, plays, novels, films-all sung, written, staged, dedicated, made for the city of Istanbul. So, what exactly is it that makes the painter’s perspective of Istanbul distinctive?

The common view on Istanbul can possibly be summarized under two headings: exotic/touristic praises for the city, continuously complimenting on the beauty of it and rather pessimistic city panoramas, remaining distant to the continuous transformation it undergoes and the chaos that is nurturing it.

Şiir Özbilge does not give the least credit to both of these stereotypical views on Istanbul. She observes, senses, experiences the city; her first intention is to re-read the city, and transform her impressions into aesthetics. At the same time, she has a desire to experience the city in all its multipli’city. She does not intend to homogenize diversities that make up the city through Western marketing strategies nor does she want to romanticize the whole thing with an Eastern spirit. Each sound of the city is of unique value to her. The daily language flowing through bare life, the living street, intermingling cultures, dreams, stories...

The story, seems to focus on, small and humane interspaces and the changes, transformations, multipli’cities taking place at those verges where neither sociology, history nor anthropology manage to communicate. Certainly wisdom, as much as knowledge, is a matter of intuition. Because some knowledge can only be achieved by loving the city with great compassion, dissolving in it or getting lost in its sounds and images. This painting style, definitely is preoccupied with the very same concern of the drawers of the cavemen age: it builds up a big dream through intuition right from those walls to the towers of the city.

Şiir just adds two more naive branches of knowledge to the structure she has acquired through intuition: the playful wisdom of the children with whom she has been working for more than 20 years and the naive perception of collaborative internet dictionaries-which function as a sort of horizontal and non-hierarchal Library of Babel -formed by youngsters coming from all segments of the city. Finally, combined with her barest feelings, she transfers this acquired knowledge to her painting.

Just as the structures of the city that overlap layer onto layer-while the East and the West continue to pull it at both ends-time and space nest in each other like embroidery in Şiir’s paintings. This encounter sets free an overlook/image both historical and contemporary. Yet the painter has no belief in vertical and progressive history. So she does not hesitate to add particular “lines of escape” deliberately skipped by history, in horizontal spaces right beside perpendicular lines of development. Within this poetic history, if there is a Sultan Murat, there also is a Hezarfen (*Ahmet Celebi-Ottoman aviator).

As part of archaeology of progress, she includes myths as communicating vessels alongside history books. The tower of Babel, Noah’s Ark, Cybele now and at this very moment, all are reconstructed in the body of Istanbul. That is also the reason why the artist labels current findings she puts beneath her paintings as “pottery”. This encounter is as living as history and its tales, which all of a sudden appear in our face over the course of the excavations conducted for Marmaray or Taksim.

There is continuous digging and construction in the city. Isn’t it like our hope that is permanently being built and torn down?

A painting, digging in its own history while yearning for a pure state in the future, a painting dreaming of its future within the fluidity of the day and the universe of endless possibilities. And a painting which at the same time has a voice in itself. A painting of the sirens of the ships, grader noises, sounds of calls for prayer and church bells mixing up with cries of seagulls. An angel stretching from cacophonies to nego¬tiations, learning to listen from continuous communication, giving way/ chance to the future from amidst a choir of diversities.

Is that all?

How can I possibly summarize in this short text, the works of an artist who sincerely wishes her main audience to be children and who dreams about a dialogue between her paintings and animals?

Now this essay remains silent. It is just the hope, which is growing on the paintings that dress the canvases, that is speaking out loud. The hope reflecting in the pupils of Cybele, who guards us on the Bosphorus Bridge...

Rafet Arslan
March 2013 / Istanbul