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On 3 and 4 June 2023, I had some work in progress shown at The Power of Play exhibition in London, organized by Work Show Grow, a school and community of artists founded by Natasha Caruana, which I joined in January 2023. It has been an immense step for me to allow myself to take the time and create the space my artistic and literary practices need in my life. The artists, writers, poets, and all sorts of makers among you would recognize this constant juggle between work that brings us the cash we need to lead a decent living (and let’s face it, the neoliberal politics we live in don’t make it easy) and our artistic practices, which necessitate effort and time before they can turn into income streams (if they ever do). So, Work Show Grow has been a home for me and my process, and I couldn’t think of a better place to share a glimpse of My Gestures for the first time. My inspiration to frame my artistic practice under a variety of gestures was born from reading the essays in a book titled Gestures by media theorist, philosopher, writer Vilém Flusser (translated to English by Nancy Ann Roth). In this book, Flusser writes about many gestures: the gesture of writing, the gesture of listening to music, the gesture of painting, the gesture of shaving and many more. The way he has described the gestures inspired me to look at my own gestures and use his book as a departure point, and not an adaptation, to explore further what my gestures mean when I create, and what they become when I share them with people through different formats. I first started to share these explorations on Instagram with a dedicated account: @my.gestures. For the Power of Play exhibition, I presented two booklets, which we could also call sketchbooks. I have used paper sample catalogues to showcase the process, and with this format, highlight this is work in progress (and also play!) in the hope that visitors would feel comfortable just taking them in their hand, flipping through the little cards, discovering the images and reading the short notes on the different gestures I am sharing: the gesture of pressing flowers, the gesture of the self-portrait, the gesture of feeding birds, the gesture of praying, the gesture of tenderness, the gesture of image transfers… There are many, but to me, the first gesture of all is the gesture of writing, which in itself includes so many others such as choosing a notebook, filling the fountain pen with ink, pressing lavender flowers in between pages. This process is endless. Like Vilém Flusser, I am a multilingual writer- I move easily from one language to another in one sentence: as I speak, write, dream. Unlike Flusser, I am no media theorist I also am not an academic; I write from experience, from practice- not from theory (sometimes concepts) always from my reality and biography. Flusser wrote on a range of gestures from writing to shaving or listening to music, he wrote his essays in the beginning of the 1990s in German, I have read the translation in English by Nancy Ann Roth, which is the text I refer to in my own process of exploring my own gestures. I would like to share one specific gesture in more details with you: the gesture of praying (and of photographing loved ones praying). During my visits to Istanbul and Brussels in recent years, I have photographed the women in my family praying, one is my late grandmother —we lost her in September 2022, and I feel blessed for having captured these moments which I cherish today. This is a reflection I will add into the gesture of photography: how it can also become an essential ritual of grief, before grief occurs. In my family, some of us pray, some don’t. Some are pious, others not at all. This creates a wide variety of ways we experience spirituality and belief. If we concentrate on gestures, there are several happening here: the gesture of praying, the gesture of photographing loved ones praying, and then sharing the gesture of praying in an artistic format. Where these photographs were taken is important too: praying in Brussels doesn’t mean the same as praying in Istanbul in 2020. But in these women’s hearts, their connection to their beliefs is what matters. In the current political and highly polarised contexts in Western Europe where I am based and where my work is created, the gesture of sharing loved ones praying is in itself an attempt to counter islamophobic discourses and offer beauty and complexity in a highly polarized society. I have many more gestures and am exploring the ways in which I can make them encounter readers, viewers, listeners… Like many of my artistic or literary projects, this one is a process too. I am in no hurry, I trust the gesture of keeping doing the work. What are your gestures? I hope my work will invite you to join in this reflection and look at the variety of gestures that are in your life, what they mean to you, emotionally, intellectually and more.
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