On Hah!

Deniz Özgültekin
4 Mar
12 dakikada okunur

The group exhibition titled Hah! at Arter centers satire as a way of coping with political pressure, while opening up a discussion on how video can still function as a critical tool today. On view until April 12, 2026, the exhibition brings together works that address capital, institutional authority, and gender norms

Words: Deniz Özgültekin

Cem Örgen, Pop, 2024, Video installation, 3’ (color, sound), laser-welded and sandblasted aluminum, metal plate, pipes and spring, XPE foam, Pop Bars (permanent marker on laser-cut aluminum, industrial polyamide cylinder machined on a lathe), 165 x 90 x 52 cm, Pop Bars: 21 x 8 x 8 cm

Digital banking makes it possible to do everything from investing to taking out loans, from money transfers to buying and selling gold. Applications such as the Central Physician Appointment System and e-government platforms allow people to carry out bureaucratic procedures through their personal devices. Platforms like X, TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube enable different forms of politicization and socialization. X is like a rally square: from Trump to imprisoned politicians, from ministers to university clubs, everyone announces their political position there. TikTok and Instagram are highly suited to the circulation of fast content, short videos, and images detached from their context. YouTube, meanwhile, is one of the most important news sources in Turkey. The reason for this seemingly obvious opening is to recall that the term “digitalization” no longer feels sufficient as a diagnosis or definition today. A serious portion of the day is spent looking at screens, and screen times of six to eight hours have become routine for everyone. The word’s description of a transition from the analog world to the digital one, of ties formed in non-physical environments, now seems outdated. The critiques directed at the screen and consumer culture during the period when video was taking shape as an art form, meanwhile, have been repeated over and over again for more than fifty years. As such, organizing an exhibition focused on video carries the risk of repeating an empty nostalgia and a critique that has lost its addressee. It is not easy to talk about video when it has become this ordinary. Of course, it would be wrong to speak of video becoming part of everyday life as though this were a new development. But it is necessary to recognize that the video habits of the last ten years are different from those of the past. At this point, it is not easy to tolerate videos longer than a few seconds on a phone, or to watch a film or a series without directing one’s attention elsewhere. And once this is combined with videos in exhibitions, watched from an unknown point onward, with uncomfortable headphones, standing up or seated awkwardly, it becomes difficult to draw an optimistic picture for video art. In the age of brainrot, can video still have something to say?

Left: Braco Dimitrijević, The Resurrection of the Alchemists, 2006, Video (color, sound), 2’18”, Arter Collection

Right: Anetta Mona Chişa & Lucia Tkáčová, Kapital: Magic Recipes for Love, Happiness and Health, 2006, Video (color, sound), 12’17”, Arter Collection

Hah! is a video exhibition. Curated by Delfin Öğütoğulları, the exhibition brings together videos produced between 2006 and 2024 by Özgür Atlagan, Anetta Mona Chişa & Lucia Tkáčová, Selin Davasse, Burak Delier, Braco Dimitrijević, Cem Örgen, Serra Tansel, Berkay Tuncay, Sinan Tuncay, Kubilay Mert Ural, and Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz. It is important to keep this time span in mind, because although the exhibition focuses on the medium, on video, it does not offer an art historical overview. In this way, Hah! can be both a video exhibition and something that does not have to take on all the meanings carried by video as a medium. The narrowing of the scope gives the curator a space in which to move, or rather, the curator opens up this space herself through her selection. What holds together this selection from the last twenty years is satire. The exhibition approaches humor as a way of coping with political pressure. Satire is a productive field for artists; it contains many possibilities, including making things comic, evading censorship, mocking, and lightening critique and heavy subjects. Artists can even articulate their criticism by making themselves look ridiculous. For a curator, however, this is not quite possible. The curator has to focus on carrying the seriousness of the issues being criticized into the exhibition and preserving them there. Only under such conditions can the artists’ critiques acquire meaning. Otherwise, moving through the exhibition space may mean being made to listen to a series of jokes piled one after another, some of them not particularly funny. Still, in order to preserve the exhibition’s narrative, the curator should not construct a stern, overly serious framework. This means that a curator placing satire at the center has more than one criterion to attend to while bringing works together; otherwise the exhibition can easily become boring, didactic, ridiculous, or unserious. Hah! situates itself on this fine line.

The exhibition is on view on the fourth floor of Arter, in Gallery 4. Hah! offers a three-part narrative: it addresses artists’ responses to pressures shaped by “the capital-oriented art market, institutional authority, and gender norms.” The exhibition text also emphasizes the presence of an approach that “lays bare the absurdities and vulnerabilities of dominant systems.” The emphasis on “dominant systems” explains why the exhibition is not divided into rigidly separated sections. Since the market, institutional authority, and patriarchy are all already intertwined, it seems like the right decision not to structure the exhibition as a sequence of clearly beginning and ending chapters. Especially in the case of video, which could easily be split apart by dark rooms and individual viewing units, avoiding that choice gives visitors the chance to form connections between the works.

Selin Davasse, Homoeconomicus, 2021, Video (color, sound), 6’47”

The notion of “institutional authority” inevitably raises the question of whether the institution in question is a museum. Selin Davasse’s Homo Economicus is one of the first works encountered in the exhibition. Davasse addresses the relationship between artists’ economic precarity and institutional validation. While artists try to survive through fees, project budgets, or irregular sales, exhibitions, openings, and museums effectively conceal this fragility. In Berlin, at the Altes Museum, Davasse performs Muzaffer İlkan’s Şarkılar Seni Söyler among classical sculptures, rewriting the lyrics as “homo economicus”. The figure of “homo economicus”, which assumes that individuals act through rational, self-interested economic decisions, becomes for Davasse a marker of vulnerability. If everyone is acting rationally, then in any situation where it does not produce a loss, one will be inclined to allow the weaker to be eliminated, crushed, or pushed out of the system. Davasse points to the artist’s weak position within competition. For the invisible hand, the disappearance of those who cannot compete becomes a secondary damage.

Burak Delier, Anlaşma, 2013, 2-channel HD video (color, sound), 8 hours, Diagram: inkjet print, 90 x 123 cm, Agreement: inkjet print, 21 x 29.7 cm

Similarly, Burak Delier opens up his own position as an artist to discussion. He asks his gallery to take out a bank loan. A small step for 2026 but a significant one for 2013, the gallery takes out a loan of 5,000 TL and hands it to Delier to realize the work. The artist collaborates with a trader, asking him to generate the 18-month interest of this amount solely through stock market manipulation. If successful, the trader will keep both the interest and the principal. A key component of the work is the circulation of money and its movement within the market. The money moves between the gallery, the artist, the trader, and the collector: the bank gives a loan to the gallery, the gallery transfers the money to the artist, the artist passes it to the trader, the trader operates it in the stock market, turning it into an artwork, the collector acquires the work and the money returns to the gallery, the gallery pays the artist and settles its debt to the bank. The system depends on two conditions. The bank must provide the loan, and the collector must purchase the work. The collector and the bank appear as two actors funding the art market. Yet their existence is interdependent, and neither enters the equation without the other. If the collector does not buy the work, the bank loan cannot be repaid. As repayment becomes impossible, access to credit is restricted, and the flow of money that enables artistic production is cut off. In that case, the artist cannot produce new work, and the collector cannot find new work to acquire. The same scenario unfolds if the bank does not provide the initial loan. Both the collector and the bank seem necessary for sustaining artistic production. Their presence secures one another, just as their absence triggers one another. The continuity of artistic production rests on this fragile web of relations.

Both Davasse and Delier bring together institutional authority and market orientation. This convergence is not surprising. The term “institution” should not only evoke foundations, associations, or companies with well-designed buildings and established teams. It is more accurate to think through a broader definition that includes the state and its extensions, networks formed by multiple actors, and any structure that establishes its own rules. Through such a definition, it becomes easier to understand how artists bring together capital and authority, and through this pairing, gender norms as well.

Sinan Tuncay, Aşiyan, 2023, Video (color, sound), CRT monitor, metal cage, stool, 3’55”, Banu & Hakan Çarmıklı Collection

Sinan Tuncay’s Aşiyan presents a caged television in which the artist appears singing Sensiz Bensiz, a song from Türkan Şoray’s 1969 film Aşk Mabudesi. With earrings, a necklace, and makeup, Tuncay performs playback, much like Şoray. Set against a green screen, that is, not situated in a real space, the image of Tuncay on the caged television is accompanied by stools placed in front of the screen. The work adopts a familiar arrangement: like a coffeehouse, a nightclub, or a seaside tea garden, there is a television placed high for everyone to see, secured with a cage, an old Turkish film, and stools. Yet an unavoidable artificiality, even a sense of falseness, permeates the work. The film’s star is not in a real space and does not actually sing. The desired star, Türkan Şoray, is not on the screen either. The television and stools are not in the place they reference but in a gallery. In fact, the places evoked are rarely visited, neither when encountering the work nor when mentioned in writing. Perhaps they are never visited. The arrangement is immediately recognized as “like a coffeehouse,” but this recognition belongs to a viewer imagining what an unvisited coffeehouse is like. The images are understood as “like an old Turkish film,” yet they resemble films encountered while channel surfing, daytime broadcasts filling airtime on channels whose audience is uncertain. If Yeşilçam’s legacy is now confined to daytime television, and coffeehouses are places many have never stepped into, what allows Tuncay’s work to be recognized so easily? It may be more appropriate not to answer this question, or to leave it to cultural historians.

Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz, Sessiz, 2016, HD video (color, sound), 7’47”, Performance: Aérea Negrot, Music: Miguel Toro & Aérea Negrot, courtesy of Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam and Marcelle Alix, Paris

For the queer subject on the screen, it becomes easier to emerge from among images that are familiar yet absent from lived experience. For forms of existence caught between denial and hostility, constructing a recognizable scene seems productive. In contrast to the atmosphere of Aşiyan, Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz’s Silence directly incorporates its spatial reference into the work. In front of a white cardboard surface, a series of different microphones appears. When the cardboard falls, Oranienplatz in Berlin becomes visible. Between 2012 and 2014, Oranienplatz hosted a refugee camp. Accompanied by Boudry and Lorenz, Aérea Negrot first looks at the camera in silence, referencing John Cage. The microphones, which resemble those extended toward an important political figure, now face a trans woman. Yet Negrot does not approach them eagerly. She remains silent before them. Her silence is followed by a song she has written herself.

Dear President, / Your profile is vague, / You have no arms, no hair, no legs / and no sex / Your enemy is your lover / I need / Makeup, underwear, and hormones!

Dear visitor, / Are you optimistic? / When our country is at war / Is freedom more masculine than genocide? / Is a lie more feminine than allies? / What is the difference between terror, horror, and war? / What is the difference / between a museum, an artwork, and an enemy? / It all sounds the same to me!

Kubilay Mert Ural, Tyrant-Ex, 2018, Video (color, sound), 7’

While Boudry and Lorenz address ambiguous heads of state and spectators who remain passive in the face of genocide, Kubilay Mert Ural engages with a political figure whose position is far more explicit. In Tyrant-Ex, Ural brings together Netanyahu and a T-Rex. The T-Rex may be a popular toy for children, but that does not make it any less violent. Referencing a world in which the strong survive and eliminate the weak, Tyrant-Ex points to the aggressive nature of this hierarchy. By voicing a statement Netanyahu made on Twitter in 2018 and placing it behind the dinosaur, Ural avoids directly naming its original speaker. In this way, the settler colonial policies associated with Netanyahu in the West Bank, the violence in southern Lebanon, the genocide in Gaza, and authoritarianism within Israel are rendered anonymous. Once anonymized, the words seem to belong to the T-Rex. It becomes difficult to distinguish between the bloodthirsty dinosaur, known for its aggression and carnivorous nature, and Netanyahu’s statements. The tube television and the dinosaur recall early 2000s video games played through TV screens. Combining an activity associated with leisure and entertainment with a reality marked by displacement and death produces a sharp contrast. Across television channels and messaging platforms, images of violence circulate rapidly, sometimes censored, sometimes so explicit that one is forced to look away. In this context, violence risks becoming just another clip or forwarded message. The element of gamification in Ural’s work is therefore precisely placed. Tyrant-Ex evokes not an innocent children’s game but the kinds of games through which adolescents rehearse domination and cruelty. Still, turning Netanyahu’s words into subtitles within a game may not be sufficient to hold a politician accountable for ongoing violence. Creating distance between the words and their speaker allows for a broader critique of the authoritarian and racist tendencies they represent. Yet demanding accountability for ongoing colonization and genocide may ultimately be more meaningful than critiques that remain detached from their subjects.

Öğütoğulları intervenes at this point, restoring what Ural leaves suspended. In the wall text accompanying the work, the curator makes explicit the origin of the T-Rex’s words. She prevents the disappearance of the figure being satirized. The texts accompanying all the works function in this way, guiding the flow of the exhibition. While there is nothing inherently radical about using explanatory texts, recognizing the exhibition’s needs and making these texts publicly accessible, rather than restricting them to printed guides, is a significant decision. In this way, the exhibition attempts to preserve the critical dimension of humor. The texts offer orientation for viewers who cannot fully follow or interpret the works. With few exceptions, exhibitions remain spaces where videos are encountered from the middle rather than the beginning. Bringing the texts onto the walls facilitates navigation and removes the necessity of a separate guide. The curator thus aims to prevent the exhibition from collapsing into a sequence of disconnected jokes, instead fostering connections between the works. Another crucial decision lies in the duration of the videos. The longest video in the exhibition runs for twelve minutes. Most are not structured through continuous sequences that require viewing from beginning to end. This allows viewers to enter the works at any point without losing coherence. In this sense, the exhibition offers an answer to the question posed at the beginning. Yes, video can still say something in the age of brainrot. But it must adapt rather than resist the shortening of attention spans. It is overly optimistic to assume that the problems produced by moving images on screens can be resolved by other moving images on screens. To claim that this can be achieved within exhibition spaces, through art institutions, risks becoming almost absurd.

From left to right:

Özgür Atlagan, Tulum Değiş Tokuş Âlemi, 2021, 2-channel SD video (color, sound), 1’42”, produced with the support of Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten and SAHA

Berkay Tuncay, Bu İmaj ya da Video Kaldırılmış veya Silinmiştir, 2011, Digital image (JPEG), screen, variable dimensions

SSerra Tansel, Ayrık Meydan, 2021 Video (color, sound, 3’8”)

Öğütoğulları has been working as an assistant curator at Arter since 2024. Institutions on the scale of Arter rarely grant those in “assistant” or “associate” roles the opportunity to develop their own programs. In this sense, the exhibition is significant not only for the curator but also for Arter. Part of its distinctiveness lies in the way Öğütoğulları takes on the task of balancing the artists’ humorous approaches with the political edge of satire. In a context where large institutions are often criticized for risk-averse programming and inertia, it is notable that an assistant curator realizes an exhibition that does not conceal its political position. In a setting where institutional censorship has become normalized, opening space for assistants appears productive for both institutions and their workers, allowing them to test their limits. For an assistant curator to develop their own methods in relation to high-ceilinged exhibition spaces, display strategies, artists, audiences, and collections, it is necessary to be able to initiate their own programs. Progressing from assisting a senior figure toward eventually programming exhibitions may have been a model of another century, but today it feels outdated. In his text An Open Letter to Arts Leaders in Their 20s and 30s, Emil J. Kang writes that “those in their late twenties and those in their mid-sixties no longer relate to each other solely through mentorship.”¹ It may be too early to claim this definitively, but examples like this create an opportunity to rethink mentorship, often taken for granted as inevitable due to age hierarchies. For both Arter and Delfin Öğütoğulları, one can hope that Hah! marks the beginning of future programs to come.