Begüm Berber was born in 1991 in İzmir, Turkey. Since 2004, she has acted in various plays. She was sent as a cultural envoi to Belgium in 2006 via Socrates project. She got into Hacettepe University, the department of American Culture and Literature in 2009. She attended Paris 8 for two terms via Erasmus program. There, she took film criticism classes from the Huffington post critic Karin Badt. During her studies she was a member of department’s drama club both as a director and an actor. She graduated in 2015 as the valedictorian of her class. She volunteered for a radio show at Radyo Ege Kampüs in 2018 where she assumed the role of creative producer and presenter of her radio program called Supernova. She wrote book reviews and analysis. Currently, her occupation involves translation of scripts, academic articles, and books.
What is the reason for us not being able to feel the spark of life within us and to watch as it is passing by?
In our modern world, society has acquired a hyperactive character via the technologies that shorten distances, speeding up communication and enabling rapid production. This state of hyperactivity is an indication that economic and political authorities discipline subjects through the medium of time.
Today where non-stop talking results in noise, the production of information in lack of knowledge and urbanization in mass migration, humans lost their sense of history and perception of time.
The disruption of our time perception is the fragmentation of the present in our mind – the only time we actually have in our possession- within the extending link of the complex societal organizations. South Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han approaches this disruption through his discussion of dyschronicity. Dyschronicity is a state of discontinuation where moments fail to follow one another, piling over one another. The hyperactivity of the society desynchronizes time and weakens the strength of an encounter, an event or an experience to establish its ground in the present; therefore, time loses its narrative structure for the subject. The collapse of temporal tension needed for the creation of experience, knowledge, memory and expectation breaks up and estranges every moment.
The estrangement in question brings about an estrangement to our being, personal history and to each other. In the world and being together, the fact that social practices are based only on consumption, the infinite production of information and materials alienate humans from its position of guarding the flow of time, namely the whole consisting of changes. Society today wants the present to be constantly updated in order to keep everything "new". The separation of the present from the past and the future effaces the permanent and long-lasting relationships we would establish by way of contemplation. The feeling of being at loss of a direction and the demand of sensation at every moment are stemmed from this constant update.
Milan Kundera interprets the disruption of our time perception and the loss of continuance in his novel named “The Joke”: “Today history is no more than a thin thread of the remembered stretching over an ocean of the forgotten, but time moves on, and an epoch of millennia will come which the inextensible memory of the individual will be unable to encompass; whole centuries and millennia will therefore fall away, centuries of paintings and music, centuries of discoveries, of battles, of books, and this will be dire, because man will lose the notion of his self, and his history, unfathomable, unencompassable, will shrivel into a few schematic signs destitute of all sense.”
Humanity, imprisoned in schematic ways of living deprived of meaning, is taken with the impression of freedom within these patterns through forgetfulness. The smoothest way of concocting this illusion is the management of time by figures of Power. To reference Baudrillard’s analogy, Power transformed into a ghost and gained an infinite virtual force. Events are being policed by daily agenda. The instantaneously produced agenda is “the whole system of information – an immense machine for producing the event as sign… Instead of unfolding as part of a history, things – (events as sign) - have begun to succeed each other in the void.” The reason we have become indifferent in the face of events is that events are subjected to constant circulation altered as vital data to be consumed “as an exchange value on the universal market of ideology, of spectacle, of catastrophe, etc. -“. The increasing value attached to the updates turns the experience of living into a time to be consumed unconsciously. The fact that information and action are getting obsolete by leaps as much as the materials themselves before acquiring any meaning hinders a dialogue to be established between the past and the future.
The past and the future can only be gathered together by means of a time point flowing into another, via the flow of knowledge. Kundera expressed the concern that the inability to form a dialogue between humans and knowledge may also threaten the formation of dialectic in his novel “Ignorance” as “[t]housands of deaf and mute horsemen would strive to deliver tragic and incomprehensible messages to people far away but no one would find time to listen.”
What comes to mind when we think of time getting disrupted in our perception: Is it our time that is fading away or our own being?
According to Norbert Elias, as the links of the complex societal structures extend, the control of the subject is ensured by time; therefore, time operates as a self-control mechanism for the individual. This external regulation of time imposes a time conscience to the individuals and internalized as a language at an early age. When behaved to the contrary of time conscience, a kind of uneasiness awakens within the individual similar to what one might feel when breaking a taboo. Time conscience not only regulates the life of the individuals but also imprints dominant societal imperatives on the self.
Han depicts the perception of time in three dimensions as the eternal present, linear time and point time. Each corresponds to a specific time in accordance with the shaping of perception throughout human history and the narratives concerning the human existence. As Han states in pre-modern narrative, time is the protector of an eternal order. That is, in pre-modern age, time itself is a narrative that reflects the cycles of nature, human body and the continuity of life. Humans shaped their lives and formed a collective living based on the rituals that mirror the physical time of the nature. For them, time is an undividable “Now”. The arrival of the age of enlightenment glorified the labor of men and changed their perception of time. In historical narrative the present is only designed for the sake of the future. In this narrative, future erases the past. The humankind who has become the manufacturer of history finds meaning in its existence by working, and pursues after its ideals, motivated by promises, on a linear time axis. The fact that the way of world can be designed by human intervention has nurtured the belief that life would gain its meaning in the future. Humanity, to whom a way of salvation was offered for its existence, shaped its consciousness by forging materials to find its way to freedom. Myths were demolished and nature was dominated.
Along came the industrialization; the undifferentiated and uninterrupted production of objects resulted in the mechanization of the society and the life of the individuals within, depersonalizing them. Since the standardization of time in the age of industrialization in line with working hours, time has acquired an exchange value in capital. Human life is divided into hours, minutes and split seconds in which people are productive and the plus time left from work is employed to put people back to work. The more the machine accelerated, the more time gained pace. Humanity who resists any obstacle between itself and the future has begun to consume the present as quickly as it could. Thus, the present is reduced to “points” and all the narrative is lost. The fragmented time mechanism working through abstract symbols incessantly produces a new “Now” without giving any opportunity for knowledge to be formed in the memory.
The consciousness of being which has been serving as a medium by designing the world has paved the way to a time crisis that infiltrates in the lives of the individual hundred years later on. The obsessive importance given to action – constant working, demonstrating and commenting – has led people to leap to the next moment without considering the present moment, and deluded them as if time keeps running faster. This understanding on the consciousness of being that perseveres even after history has reached an end point and great devastations standing against questioning the things which cannot be created by labor struggle and things that cannot be altered by consumption such as the human soul and feelings, and labeling these as taboos has driven the humanity to the brink of rootlessness, an inability to bond and the collapse of reasoning. It can be said that humanity is facing a time where the consciousness of being is effaced in the process.
A desynchronized time perception, constituted of moments piling over moments is reigning on our lives today. To lead an active life only to consume time is causing humans to develop a limited relationship with the world and themselves, leaving no time for contemplation in this relation. In a hyperactive society everything is viewed a narrow perspective. Yet, humans need to deepen their look on the world, act with contemplation to make their actions meaningful and they need to tie the threads of time together to find a sense in their being.
Your Hand Full of Hours takes its title from Paul Celan’s poem presenting a dialogue of a life time spent in the oppression of dislocation, labour and commodification of lives. It alludes to the political and economic power over people and their lifetimes diminished to ticking hours without a meaning.
The exhibition focuses on the vicious circle between alienation and disruption of our time perception while perusing alienation of humans to their very beings through the manipulated mediums by the artists. In 4’33’’John Cage meditates a performance of silence, allowing it to be performed with any instrument, exploring our perception of time in connection with our movements and togetherness. In the video Geamana, Stefania Crişan imagines a post-apocalyptic time and invites the people to witness an ecological disaster carried out by political and economic oppression. Geamana exceeds the grounds of a camera frame following Crişan’s performances Reverse the Entropy and Ophelia and the Anthropocene, melting the frost of a frozen time explores an amorphous and undefined common space of being in the face of growing indifference. The ritual of Reverse the Entropy, employs clay and paint which is spread over the gallery floor and left to dry, and calls us to reconnect with the world “the ground of our existence” and the spirit “the ground of its reason” in a plea that reminds us of co-existence. Ophelia and the Anthropocene, on the other hand, refers to the eradication of personal histories through a story of a woman who passed away in Geamana yet kindles the fire of hope that what is vanished would be replaced by time out of the bounds of a clock. Bringing the efforts and tasks of the body into our attention, Nezaket Ekici underlines the fact that the economic role given to human beings is kept in the consumption cycle by an invisible power with her work Cash Machine. Ekici, uses a metronome as a numbing effect to the commodification of the body and the instantaneous consumption of the commodity within the capital. Emphasizing imposed definitions and roles on humans as the historical subject, Eugenio Ampudia’s Surrender approaches historicity of being by juxtaposing the Olympics with Velasquez’s Spears painting. In Our Destiny was Now Ampudia, draws the intersecting lines of time in a hectic post-Anthropocene scene, and questions what would humanity bring into their future existence in their given time on earth.