End of Dreams is an installation combining sculptural pieces and video experimentation, and is exhibited at SALT Galata in İstanbul starting with 6th of February 2015. Prior to seeing his End of Dreams, I was more or less familiar with the core issues the artist is dealing with from his 2014 single screen film, End of Season, and some research on his previous works. To start with, in the case of Nikolaj Bendix Skyum Larsen, there is an important content central to all his works which wanders around every film he makes as well as every installation he presents; there is a unifying content of all his works showing his seemingly endless artistic endeavour to represent that content, combining an organic unity between his works and issue that he is so closely engaged in. The leitmotif of his works is immigration, and this issue is dealt bearing its relations to globalization, multiculturalism, and integration. In End of Season, he filmed Üylüktatar Köyü, in the north west of Turkey by the river Meriç, which is one of the busiest illegal entry points of immigrants to Europe. In a rather documentary tone, Larsen depicts directly the socioeconomical side of the immigration problem, immigrants’ relation to villagers, and villagers’ attestation of the immigration processes- without neither taking a political stand on the migration issue nor taking this issue to a more transcendental and abstract domain.
End of Dreams may be similar to the former in that the artist again abstains from taking a definite political side and from declaring the last sentence on the issue, yet it differs clearly from it with its abstract and poetic style as well as− it is too hard to articulate, but− the extreme spiritual arousement one gets while experiencing the installation. What I appreciate most in Larsen’s current work is that his choice of media and the background narrative of the processes that the exhibited sculptures are undergone; I think, and will explain, that the artist represents and rebuilds the reality of migration in a unique and expressive way thanks to his use of media and his ability to embrace the whole process the media undergoes in different environments.
While starting to work on his project he devotes to the honor of the immigrants who lost their lives trying to encompass the Aegean Sea from Turkey to Greece “for a better life” in Europe, Larsen intended to keep 48 antromorphic shapes made out of concrete canvas−a material used for disaster relief−under the Aegean Sea, and to wait as long as these sculptures are surrounded with a patina of natural life under the sea. I was impressed when I first read this idea at the poster of the work, because I have never thought of being able to think a fully natural process of life as a symbol of “pure Beauty”, even when confronted with a literally concrete metaphor of death−growing of algas covers the concrete canvas, which becomes extremely rigid upon confronting water due to the cement powder inside it−. I also feel that the artist intended to put the sculptures under the same waters which engulfs the immigrants and from which the souls of immigrants ascended from their dead bodies lying at the bottom of the sea. The potential of representing an environment belonging to the installation as an art form is enhanced by Larsen, because he creates a perfect balance and parallelism between the real environment he wants to represent and the artificial medium he is using to represent and rebuild this reality. Actually, this achievement is a result of a coincidence, pure chance which is tragic for Larsen at first, yet inspiring later as he discovers a greater possibility of expression in it. Not waiting for sculptures to grow patina on them, an unexpected storm destroyed all, only 11 of them remained at the bottom of the sea with the affects of the storm become visible on their surface clearly.
At the end, Larsen combines these remaining figures with the shootings of the underwater remnants in an installation where the sculptures lying dead-still on the ground conveys a pessimistic atmosphere. They resemble dead bodies of immigrants wrapped up in the blankets and left to the sea. The sea represents the big, greedy, and harsh “globalized” world. Also for me the sculptures seem like larvas, a potential life forms, but in this harshly pesssimistic case, the larvas are damaged thus they cannot give life to the butterflies.
When I could eventually get out of the exhibition room after 2.5 hours, I asked myself−actually keep asking still−that what is the quality or the element this artwork has which makes it represent the “immigrants drowning on their illegal passage to their dreamed land” and which makes it literally rebuild this reality in a different environment, without not even mentioning or showing an imigrant or anything concrete and real regarding to this issue? Because, once I started to engage with it, I feel like I have engaged with both the whole process the immigrants and the materials are undergone. I do not have a definite answer to this question for now, yet I think one needs to look for its answer in the treatment of the artist to the art form s/he employs−what s/he contributes to it, how does s/he draw its lines, how does s/he enhance the borders of expressions by a given art form−, in Larsen’s case, his appreciating the organic and natural processes in installation art form where the artist endeavors to compose the environment to create a holistic experience.
BESTE GÜN ASLAN 