EDA BERKMEN
Eda Berkmen is a curator at Arter in Istanbul. Her new show, Rounded by Sleep, explores that most elemental of human experiences, sleep. Gathering works from Arter’s collection and beyond, the show delves into intimacy and sharing, the individual and society, care and control, resistance and submission, and progress and repetition through a selection of contemporary artworks, as well as historical representations and archaeological artefacts.
Interview by Thomas RouechéPortrait by Defne Tesal
Thomas Roueché Sleep is so important; it can affect our moods so extremely.
Eda Berkmen Sleep deprivation is one of the most used tactics for torture. It’s used to remove autonomy or any kind of willpower. You can break a person’s will very fast by controlling their sleep. In Jonathan Crary’s 24/7 [2014], he gives a lot of examples of how sleep tactics are used in the military; for example, in the Pentagon research was done for long periods of time to optimise the potential of soldiers to sleep four hours a night, but it’s impossible. You can drug them to sleep more, and you can keep them up for a long time, but they still get sleep deprivation. I also find it so weird because it’s like a third of your life, and you don’t think about it. There’s so much to learn from it.
TR Where did you begin? How did you approach the topic?
EB Initially I was working on an Eva Kot’átková exhibition, which has since been delayed, and one of her works is called Dream Machine is Asleep. In it she talks about how adults produce dreams and how sleep is an important way of reorganising your thoughts. I was thinking about sleep and its connection to the works in Arter’s collection, about sleep, dreaming, different states of consciousness. Slowly, it got narrowed down to just sleep and I don’t necessarily know how that happened. Maybe the whole pandemic situation and how so many people were talking about the world as being asleep during the pandemic. Sleep is something I love; I’m really a person associated with sleep. The show is in the ground-floor gallery, which is free for everybody, so I really wanted the concept to be relatable to all visitors. It could have been dreams but that felt almost like a cliché; sleep is more interesting and still as mysterious, but more secular, in a way.
TR Some of the works even interpret sleep to talk about plant dormancy.
EB We can’t know if plants are dreaming. I realised how physicality is important to me. I wanted to carry it into the curatorial practice as well. I started by asking people, “Oh I’m doing a show on sleep, what do you think about it?” and getting their reactions. Most people started talking about dreams instantly and many artists are like, “Well, I have this work about dreams that also connects to the idea of sleep.” The other thing was that the gallery is normally L-shaped and quite awkwardly formed. It has fairly low ceilings. I started out by talking to Duygu Doğan, who is responsible for the architectural design of the exhibition at Arter, and asking her to collaborate with me on making a space that is habitable, pleasurable and somewhere that people would like to spend time in. I wanted to evoke sleep but also wakefulness and transitioning between light and dark. She first sent me this mood board of how the spaces could be constructed. We both started thinking about how sleep has different layers. Sleep goes into sleeplessness, into hysteria, into sex; you can go into so many different places. It’s such a broad subject, but in terms of the works, I built the exhibition around three. First was We Sleep Together by Ali Emir Tapan, which speaks to ideas of family and vulnerability. Then Annika Eriksson’s work from the collection, which shows a video of a group of cats sleeping together in the street, and then İz Öztat’s work about surrendering in a public space. They became the three columns that the exhibition is built upon. I discussed this with Duygu and they are in the centre with pockets of spaces that tie in other works associated with these works. I really wanted to have a dark place with dim lights. The thing I realised later, when everything came into place, was how normally in art exhibitions, it’s so much about the eye; it’s so much about maintaining some type of distance. This show is all about breaking that distance, because of the darkness. You have to approach the works; you have to be close to them, to look at them, to feel them, to hear them. It’s about all the senses, which breaks the domination of the eye, which is associated with control from a distance.
TR The idea of communal sleep is really interesting.
EB Yes, and communal dreaming, the collective unconscious. Lots of the feedback that people have given around the show is about a sense of timelessness that sleep has for them, and the significance of a potential reawakening.
TR Quite a few works engage with urbanism and ways in which the city is used.
EB Eriksson’s work, Great Good Place, could be thought of as a critique of gentrification. Likewise, Dwellers of Gezi Park by Nevhiz, or Volkan Aslan’s Restless video of a guy trying to sleep in the common area here. İz Öztat and Ali Emir Tapan’s works also problematise the use or the lack of public space in the city.
TR In recent years there’s been a preoccupation on optimising sleep, what some people have called the gentrification of sleep.
EB This is dangerous, because it’s an attempt to conquer the last area of life that isn’t dominated by productivity. That’s why I’m scared of your watch controlling your sleep time and saying, “Oh, this was a pleasurable sleep” or “You slept enough, but you were moving too much.” I think it’s an area that is out of reach of portrayal, and it will remain that way, hopefully. One thing about Anna Della Subin’s book, Not Dead But Sleeping [2016], about the seven sleepers, or the people of the cave, was how, at the end of the story, only the sleeper can take a critical stance and compare what was before and is now. The story tells in its different versions of people who fall asleep in one moment in time and wake up in another. These sleepers embody both times, like the past and 50, 100 years later, that new present. They are living both those times at once, and able to compare them. Their experience is about protest and surrendering, but also sort of holding back and not reacting, or only reacting when the right time comes. We are so into reacting instantaneously, liking or speaking out or we feel the need to be active constantly to show ourselves or to be out there. It’s like, you can’t just sit; you can’t have that leisure time; you can’t have contemplation time. In comparison to the rest of your lifespan, biologically, when you’re awake, your muscles are breaking and when you’re sleeping, the muscles are growing. This constant shift between active and passive is something we can learn from our sleeping body. You know, exactly when you’re passive, maybe you’re more active. You don’t necessarily have to constantly expose yourself to be there or, you know, be.
TR It’s interesting too how historically and socially constructed our sense of sleep is.
EB Sleepers in the past were at times much more vulnerable, because they didn’t necessarily have specific rooms to sleep in. People would sleep within a community and if they were on the road, they would sleep at an inn, maybe on a chair. As I read more about the history of sleep, I realised that our type of sleeping – this modern idea sleep where you have a bed and a room to yourself – is actually very unusual.
TR People didn’t even sleep in the same rhythms that we do today.
EB Yes, for much of history people had two-part sleep. They slept from nine to 12 first. Then from three to six, or seven or eight, and in the middle, they did their prayers, they had sex, or they went to their neighbours or did some shopping, apparently. There’s some literature on how, I guess in London, there were these street sellers who would come out around two or three in the morning. There’s a famous study of those scientists who went into a cave where there was no light, and their bodies had no way to know what time it was and they also began to sleep in two parts. I guess among all creatures, also, we are the most efficient. We sleep longer, but we use sleep most efficiently.
Necla Rüzgar, Inner Layers 11, 2017Courtesy the artist and Galeri Nev Ankara
Ahu Akgün, I Am Not Here, This Isn't Happening, 2019
Doris and Vedat Karako Collection
TR I wanted to ask you about care and motherhood, which seem to keep coming back in the exhibition.
EB When I was working on the exhibition, the idea of motherhood was so dominant. Obviously, the first archetype of this care is motherhood. I had an incredible journey in that I wanted to have a figure or representation of Mother Mary in the show. At first, I wanted to bring an icon, a representing icon, into the exhibition, of a mother and a child, and I started researching them. Then I realised that there’s a more significant icon for me, which is the koimesis or Dormition. And koimesis means sleep. It’s a very important Orthodox icon, and it represents the final sleep of Mary. You see Mother Mary, wrapped up, mummified, in a bed, and there are the 12 apostles by her side, and they’re all crying. Then, on the top of the scene is Jesus, who has a baby in his arms, and the baby is actually Mother Mary’s soul swaddled. Below that you see a man who has had his hands cut off by an angel. There’s one at the Chora Museum. I wanted to borrow one to show in this exhibition, because of so many of the visual connections – to death, paralysis, and also the iconic mother figure. During my quest to find my koimesis icon, I got in touch with the Orthodox community in Istanbul. I found one in a church; but when we met they told me that recently there had been a rave in Sümela Monastery in Trabzon, one of Turkey’s most important Greek Orthodox sites, and this party was shown on Instagram. This had caused a huge controversy – there were letters from Ukraine and Greece and other Orthodox countries and so on – and so it would be hard for them to get permission to loan an icon. I realised I had known the rave’s promoters during my childhood – and they are the reason why I couldn’t get this piece that is so dear to me. I was taken to see the koimesis icon and as I looked at it I thought about what this icon would mean to someone whose mother had died; how many people would take solace in this representation of our mother dying and how it might relate to the death of nature that in some way we are all grieving. I thought about how my friend’s actions were affecting me in this ripple effect and how souls are connected, even though you think you have no relationship. This whole idea of coming together and sort of having that kind of care-sympathy you can have to a stranger. That is sort of the essence of what I came to during the whole journey of this exhibition, even if we never did get the koimesis to show. ◉