The Balance of Wisdom

The Balance of Wisdom

The balance of wisdom, which I first encountered at the Sharjah Museum of Islamic Civilisations, is one of the most complex hydrostatic balances ever designed and manufactured in the medieval Islamic world. The balance, a detailed description of which was provided by Abdurrahman Al-Khazini (11th-12th century) in his book Kitâbü Mîzâni’’l-hikme [“The Book of the Balance of Wisdom”], was used to determine the value of precious metals and gems. Al-Khazini’s balance was not only capable of making different types of measurements, but also vastly superior to all other balances of its period in terms of precision. According to contemporary sources, the accuracy of the balance of wisdom was remarkable. As Al-Khazini suggested, repetition is essential to obtain better results.

For me, the balance of wisdom serves as a metaphor for the “wisdom” and balance we apply to our judgement in various situations. This metaphor symbolises our ability to balance our evaluations and decisions based on knowledge, experience, intuition and ethical values. The Balance of Wisdomexhibition focuses on the balancing processes that involve hesitation, repetition, questioning and weighing. It questions the ties, relations, boundaries and balancing processes between domestic and professional life. The exhibition focuses on issues such as the often invisible nature of domestic labour, caring for oneself and others, balancing between giving and receiving, and the reciprocity.

One of the inspirations for the exhibition is Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ Manifesto For Maintenance Art 1969!Ukeles typed this three-and-a-half-page manifesto in 1969, at the peak of second wave feminism. At the time she wrote this manifesto, which was actually an exhibition proposal, Ukeles, who was, in her own words, a “full-time mother”, dedicating all her time and energy to motherhood, was thinking of transforming the tension between her identity as an artist and her identity as a mother into an art performance. “I am an artist. I am a woman. I am a wife. I am a mother (random order). I do a lot of washing, cleaning, cooking, renewing, supporting, preserving, etc. Also, (up to now separately) I ‘do’ art. Now I will simply do these maintenance everyday things, and flush them up to consciousness, exhibit them, as Art.”

Ukeles discusses a dual system, which she calls “development” and “maintenance.” For Ukeles, “development” symbolises a pure individual creation, the new, the change, and the struggle, which are usually identified with the avant-garde and the masculine. Maintenance, on the other hand, refers to “dusting off” pure individual creation, protecting the new, perpetuating change - roles mostly attributed to women within intimate spaces:

Clean your desk - Wash the dishes - Clean the floor - Wash your clothes - Wash your toes - Change the baby’s diaper - Finish the report - Correct the typos - Mend the fence - Keep the customer happy - Throw out the stinky rubbish - Watch out don’t put things in your nose - What shall I wear? - I have no socks - Pay your bills - Don’t litter - Save string - Wash your hair - Change the sheets - Go to the store - I’m out of perfume - Say it again—He doesn’t understand - Seal it again—it leaks - Go to work - This art is dusty - Clear the table - Call him again - Flush the toilet - Stay young

By “pure individual creation”, Ukeles is clearly referring to the artistic genius, a notion that has historically been attributed to men. The artist’s exhibition proposal, titled “Care,” consists of three phases: Personal care, general care, and care for the earth. In the personal care section, Ukeles proposes to move into the museum and do the daily chores she used to do at home, this time as “public art activities.” These daily chores include sweeping and polishing the floor, dusting, wiping the walls, cooking and entertaining guests.

Ukeles’ intention is to draw attention to the processes of care, to give them the value they deserve; to make unpaid, invisible labour visible; and even to elevate these processes to the status of art. The most pivotal part of her manifesto is the statement “everything I do as art is art, everything I say is art is art.” The second phase of the exhibition consists of interviews with labourers from various fields of work (cleaning worker, garbage collector, construction worker, librarian, physician, museum manager, bank manager, etc.) about their relations with care. Finally, in the section devoted to the care for the earth, Ukeles plans to bring waste to the museum and repurpose it by processing it. The artist will produce all her future works under the guidance of this manifesto.

As Ukeles draws attention with her iconic work, we live in a world where care and care work - especially in the context of domestic labour - have been devalued for centuries. During the pandemic, we faced a very serious care crisis. The Care Collective , in their book titled Bakım Manifestosu: Karşılıklı Bağımlılık Politikası[“The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence”] illuminates the dilemmas of this crisis. By exposing the inequality-producing care policies that became evident during the pandemic, they envisage a care policy by which people can access care more fairly. Underlining that invisible, devalued and exploited care labour is everywhere, they argue that care must be reclassified out of the category of non-productive labour. They draw attention to neoliberalism’s insistence on prioritizing care solely for oneself and immediate family. For a more just world, it is essential to re-imagine the limits of family care, to include wider and multiple kinship models, and to call for a collective and communal life.

Above are the sources of inspiration, the points of departure, and thought bubbles of The Balance of Wisdomexhibition. I invited artists whose work I believe resonates with the concept of care. The works of Alp İşmen, Başak Kaptan, Beyza Boynudelik, Çiğdem Menteşoğlu, Damla Sari, Merve Zeybek, Selin Göksel, Züleyha Altıntaş establish a dialogue with different aspects of the exhibition.

Alp İşmen’s charcoal work on paper, titled Şükran [“Blessing”], centers around an object left to him by his mother. İşmen, who sleeps on the pillow once used by his mother, with whom he internalised the same air, water and life for years in the same house, transforms into an artwork, in his own words, “that pillow, which witnessed her journey to the beyond, where her final years were sealed with a last breath, where he felt the dream of her head flying on her pillow, the memory of her dream, the affection he remembered and her absence in the palm of his hand.” The painting brings to mind the circularity of caring processes, the shifting of the child-parent and parent-child relationship over time, and reminds us that being able to say goodbye to life on one’s own bed and pillow is not a privilege but a right to life/death that every human being deserves.

The works of Başak Kaptan, whose object-oriented practice is evident in her works constructed between digital and analogue media, can be seen as the outputs of her co-production processes with her daughter Adel. In the video installation titled Elleri Bulut [ “Her Hands are Clouds ], a bicoloured Sümerbank sheet, which Kaptan remembers from her childhood, referring to a specific period and holding a place in the collective memory, flutters. We see Adel, a six-year-old child, playing with this sheet, unfamiliar to her, falling down and getting up again. Another work is based on Adel's process of learning to read and write during the pandemic. Kaptan traces and reproduces one of Adel's first attempts at writing the letter A, which she wrote by projecting it on the screen during the distance education process, and prints its colourless relief on engraving paper. By including photocopies of both the original and the projected version of the photograph of Adel’s right hand, which she used while writing, into the composition, she emphasises the letter A, whose shape remains intact through the projection technique used in calligraphy.

Çiğdem Menteşoğlu’s paintings, based on her personal experiences, deal with emotions and concepts such as body, fertility, waiting, alienation, love, care, protection. Menteşoğlu’s series Pregnant Paus e, a title derived from the English phrase for the state of being pregnant, refers to a productive pause and silence that heralds the arrival of something new, surprising and exciting. Believing that pregnancy is not solely a biological process, the artist alludes to the pregnancy-like processes that must be experienced before the artwork emerges. Menteşoğlu’s series, which evokes dreams in various states and contains surreal elements, focuses on the process, the inner, and the new being/existence that grows and develops within. It opens up for discussion the connection between the female experience of pregnancy and the creative processes attributed to artists.

Beyza Boynudelik's work titled İç Ses/Fasulye[“Inner Voice/Bean”] is a video about the domestic life of a professional artist, a woman who lives her life as an artist. As she goes about her daily household chores, the long-held sentences that the artist has been mulling over and over in her head, about the art scene and her future in particular, are transformed into this video work. During the filming, she improvises an internal conversation without preparing any text. While shelling beans in the video, she also questions the systems that produce inequality through examples such as Guerilla Girls from art history. Throughout the work, issues such as the unquestioned acceptance of the freedom granted to men and the challenge of women trying to produce art along with other tasks attributed to them, come to the fore. In the video, only the artist’s hands, busy shelling beans, are visible. Here, the “artist's hand” is not a metaphor for genius and talent, but a tool that handles vital and everyday tasks.

Damla Sari participated in the exhibition as an artist who cares for outdated objects. Her kinetic installation titled Havadan Sudan[“The Trivial”]is made with the velvet used in the photographic work Hediye Paketi Olsun mu? [“Giftwrapping?”]. It resembles a living landscape, but it is actually lifeless. The image of water piled on it in an immortalised moment of death, halts the time and movement of the artist. When she thinks about the stopping of time, the artist asks herself:(How could the time of water stop?) and thinks that time cannot dominate water. She gathers the links between water, time and death in a single spot, and piles on.

Merve Zeybek’s work titled Bilgelik Terazisi [“The Balance of Wisdom”] was specially produced for the exhibition. According to Merve Zeybek, all universal acts, whether artistic or not, are positioned in a place beyond representation. Because none of them represent anything, they all embody the repetition of the universe. The aim is not to represent something but to reach into its knowledge. Since everything comes into being from nothingness and the absence of nothingness, or because being emerges in nothingness, this knowledge leads to a high vibration as soon as it is attained, and this vibration is realised precisely thanks to nothingness/voidness/voidness/adam/ghayb. The rectangular areas in Bilgelik Terazisi representing the beginning, the development and the end in the work are an adventure, and at the same time a return to the essence in time, a form of disappearance and meeting the eye alongside a return to the essence. In being, there are possibilities utilized by non-being. This is an opportunity to find oneself on the path to nothingness on the balance of science.

At first glance, Selin Göksel’s work titledÇocuk da Yaparım Kariyer de[“I Make a Child and a Career”]depicts a female figure who is ironing while taking care of the baby in her arms. When viewed more carefully, the figure is actually ironing herself. The mother, who goes back and forth between her home life, baby care and career, while not neglecting her child, tries to conform to the criteria of society. As the wrinkles are flattened by ironing, the figure sometimes hides who she really is, her tastes and dreams. Apart from the act of ironing, the iron in this installation represents the artist’s father, who spent years in the production of ironing thermostats for years. Göksel, who has always felt protected and cared for by her father and learned how to produce solutions to technical matters from him, symbolises through the iron that her father, who is no longer in the world, continues to silently accompany her .

Züleyha Altıntaş’s work titled Görünmeyen Emek [“Invisible Labour”], produced exclusively for the exhibition, is a transparent, complex and nebulous “form.” Görünmeyen Emek establishes a therapeutic analogy between the state of being alone with oneself that provided by handcraft, its healing, restorative effect, and melancholy. Coming from the sculpture tradition, the artist uses crochet with rhythmic and repetitive movements to present both mental and bodily experience as a gigantic form. In the triptych accompanying this “sculptural” form, which looks transparent, delicate and fragile rather than sculpture in the classical sense, and which is exhibited together with the embroidery frame, the artist has a non-artist man dictate the now-iconic questions of feminist art: “Why are there no great women artists? Do women have to undress to enter the Metropolitan Museum? What if women ruled the world?” With Altıntaş’s work, the discipline of classical sculpture, traditionally representing permanence and immortality in the history of art, and often associated with a “masculine” obsession with bodily power, turns into a field of questioning.

Nergis Abıyeva

Translation: Oğuz Karayemiş