Walking through the Frame: Nilbar Güreş and the Performativity of the Moving Image

Abstract

Analyzing Nilbar Güreş’s video Stranger (2004–2006), this paper delves into the relationship between the moving image, mobility, and spatiality to show how she creates an embodied and gendered map of a city as an artist from Turkey. Through the act of walking and using public transport, she embodies mobile spatial practices and means of critical interaction with the city. Walking for Güreş, as for many artists, is a means of mobilizing art beyond specialized artistic containers and allows queries about art’s creation and reception. Finding inspiration in the everyday city, Güreş follows in the steps of early 20th century avant-gardes, notably the Dadaists and Surrealists, as well as conceptual, performance, and land artists including the Situationists since the 1960s who understood cities as key terrains of everyday practice, and of tangible and intangible heritage. Güreş’s practice of using space and her body in the urban can be regarded as its 21st century extension. Drawing inspiration from everyday urban spaces and experiences, Stranger enables readings of art that speak to the politics of mobility and how they can be negotiated, transgressed, and mapped while using the city as its platform for artistic performances. Stranger creates an embodied and gendered map of the city, in opposition to the traditional map, which is a disembodied visual representation. Through the moving images, the work underlines the personal and collective characteristics of Güreş’s social encounters in urban public space. Her “strange” body becomes the facilitator to problematize the European corpus as each body unfolds a mapping, producing or evincing a new subjectivity, an assemblage of intersections and encounters in relation to another body within the city. Those corporeal encounters sketch a wider cartography, that is a bordered and fragmented European corpus beyond the boundaries of painting.