Taming objects or selves?: analysis of the exhibition ''Haneden''

Official URL: http://risc01.sabanciuniv.edu/record=b1606759 (Table of Contents)

This is a supplementary text for the exhibition called HANEDEN / HOUSEHOLD and therefore should be reviewed together with the exhibited works. In this text, the concepts of home and domestic objects are examined through the artworks exhibited. Based on research in the fields of psychology, consumer studies and art, I intend to elaborate on the relationship of the individual with the object(s) in the light of various novels that are being selected on the basis of the personal relationship between the characters and the domestic objects. The quotes from novels act as unfamiliar agents in the same way that domestic objects became unfamiliar or estranged when placed in an exhibition space. When a domestic object is detached from its habitat (home) to an art space, the scent of the object changes as well. As Freud mentioned in his famous 1919 essay on the uncanny, the familiar object, described as heimlich, becomes the unfamiliar, un-heimlich, uncanny. The role of a person also changes from the user of an object to the viewer of an art object in this situation. This process of defamiliarization takes place in the form of novel quotes to illustrate what is explained in terminology throughout the text. By creating sort of a mise en abyme with exhibiting domestic objects in the first place and connecting the writing about them with literary quotes that are equally having an effect of estrangement, “art removes objects from the automatism of perception.” (Shklovsky 1917)