To stroll through a novel is to take time to immerse yourself completely into a literary world at a leisurely pace. But how does one do so if language is absent? Well, Baha Görkem Yalım, a visual artist from the Netherlands and Turkey has attempted to do just that. In the exhibition, Mulch Sleep, Baha creates an in-between world to dream anew. A world where everyday objects are made grotesque or strange in a sort-of confrontation with reality.
Until 7th January, Baha turns 1646, an experimental art space in The Hague, into an audio-visual exhibition where forms of expression through the written word have lost all significance. The Mulch Sleep exhibition is a way of communicating that translates the constraints of everyday language through the means of sculpture, video, sound, and installation practices. They present an auto fictitious environment, a mutually conflicting narrative form that amalgamates autobiography and fiction which results in an experience out of one’s own.
Moving through Baha’s exhibition, one encounters daily devices that seem foreign to the objects you come across per diem. For example, one design is a clothing rack where coats filled with flowers are hung on thorn like structures or a table where you share your daily bread stands on the weight of a sweet potato but what for? The art pieces question what it means to be within close quarters with ordinary objects as things that typically seem to be a space of safe relation turn to foe.
The dream-scape that Baha created takes the metaphorical phase ‘strolling through a novel’ and makes it literal. A sound-piece based on Austrian composer Franz Schubert’s music plays on a loop which creates an eery atmosphere to the occasion. Each gallery goer is bound to have a different experience as the art pieces conjure up associated memories in every mind in the absence of language. Eva Lakeman 12th November 2023
