On Onur Hamilton Karaoğlu’s In Vain
- Gökçen Demirkazık
- 4 gün önce
- 16 dakikada okunur
We share Gökçen Demirkazık's text on Onur Karaoğlu's participatory performance In Vain, which took its name and inspiration from an Âşık Mahzuni Şerif's song and began in Vienna in 2022, then continued in Istanbul and Berlin
Words: Gökçen Demirkazık
For seven consecutive days in 2024, if you found yourself in the vicinity of Besselpark, a rather unremarkable patch of leafless trees during a typically drab Berlin winter, you would have seen the glow. Just like I did.
Especially at night, when life appears to have drained from the ground level to the upper stories of buildings, the glow would have no doubt beckoned you from afar with its motley of four bright colors (sky blue, egg-yolk yellow, turquoise, and orange) and a hint of movement. If and when you finally got close to the glow in a narrow vitrine at Friedrichstraße 23a, you could momentarily mistake it for an extension of the bike shop next door with its brightly colored gear, though not for long. Your eyes would have found it easier to catch words gliding on the four colorful quadrants of the projection than read the backlit, handwritten poems on narrow and long pieces of paper surrounding the projected video. Eventually your gaze could migrate further south, to the ledge behind the glass, taking in but probably not recognizing printed images of marine mucilage and archaeological findings from an excavation in Istanbul. You could even catch a glimpse of several white A5-size cards on the floor behind the ledge: a few Turkish words all capitalized (“CANA,” “ATEŞ”...), coolly leaning on the walls of the small space. I cannot imagine how long you would have stayed to watch and read, but surely the title of the work—applied as a vinyl on the glass—would have haunted you for a while.
In Vain. That is the title of the installation and the subject of the hypothetical encounter described above on the premises of STRÜKTÜR’s first artistic research residency. It is based on a performance of the same title by Onur Hamilton Karaoğlu, which premiered as part of Slavs and Tatars’ Pickle Bar at the 2022 Wiener Festwochen and was subsequently brought to the artist’s hometown of Istanbul through a Protocinema exhibition. I saw an intimately scaled version of the performance on November 27, 2024, in Karaoğlu’s studio also at Friedrichstraße 23a.
In Vain. That is the title of Karaoğlu’s participatory performance, and yet the work is all about doing and making things with words. It is expressly not a cry of nihilistic desperation; in fact, the titular phrase often surfaces during the performance in grammatically or semantically negative sentences, thereby holding its abyssal darkness at arm’s length. Towards the end, one of these is repeated three times by all of the pre-recorded voices in the work: Nothing is in vain. The tenacity of this choral refrain is anything but antithetical to the sense of total surrender that pervades the artist’s original point of departure—at least, at a surface level.
Selected lyrics of Boşu Boşuna (1993) by Âşık Mahzuni Şerif, as featured in the English-language version of Onur Hamilton Karaoğlu’s In Vain:
God had given a life to me
in vain
The soul had entered my body
in vain
Water flows and reaches to sea
Sea evaporates and the drops rise
They become rain in the sky
Their drops are in vain
Once I have gone then I have come
I have searched and I have found myself
I have become Mahzuni Şerif
I live in vain
Hak bana bir ömür vermiş
Boşu boşuna
Vücuduma bir can girmiş
Boşu boşuna boşu boşuna
Su akar deryaya varır
Derya damlayı çıkarır
Gökyüzünde yağmur olur
Damlaları boşu boşuna
Gâhi gittim, gâhi geldim
Aradım kendimi buldum
Bir Mahzuni Şerif oldum
Boşu boşuna, boşu boşuna
Karaoğlu’s adoption of the phrase has its origins in Turkish Alawite folk musician and poet (“Âşık”) Mahzuni Şerif ’s (1939–2002) song, Boşu Boşuna [In Vain]: in Turkish, the repetition of the same word (boş: “empty”) with an altered grammatical case yields the phrasal meaning in question. As a whole, it does not take much effort to recognize Boşu Boşuna as a mournful tribute to the inevitability of the stages of life and becoming, metaphorized by the âşık through the self-perpetuating water cycle. However, leaving Mahzuni Şerif ’s words at that juncture—that is, acknowledging “all is in vain,” because nothing will endure the way it is—perhaps sidesteps the question of meaning and making during the little time we have on Earth. The inevitability of our eventual demise and passing into another realm or “state” need not equal lives devoid of meaning and purpose. On the contrary, the realization so candidly and directly proffered by the âşık may bring us closer to a deeper, metaphysical recognition: each stage of a cycle has its particular place, function, and therefore meaning within that cycle. If material specificity is all-too-fickle and temporary, meaning, purpose, or truth of episodic existence must be sought on the immaterial plane. Mahzuni Şerif ’s song and its soulful, tender beauty still exist. I, the writer; you, the reader of these words—we exist now. Karaoğlu’s performance ultimately poses the question: what can we do with all this plenty?
“Maybe all revolutions begin by accepting the meaning of all those that happen[ed] to us,” suggests Karaoğlu, and wraps up one of his many asides punctuating the synchronized stream of four videos. In Vain is essentially a structured poetry workshop criss-crossed by a slowly building scenario of (real) environmental threat. Karaoğlu, the only live cast member, welcomes viewer-participant-poets, and invites them to pick one of the four screen-cum-characters: a personification of the ancient Tethys Sea; Luigi Ferdinando Marsili (1658–1730), the Bolognese founding father of oceanography; Aşık Mahzuni Şerif; and Karaoğlu’s teenager self each cascade down their designated screens in a stream of text, offering first-person narratives. From the very beginning of In Vain, Karaoğlu is unequivocal about his vision and announces outright:
This piece is about writing poetry together. We will try to form an anthology, a collection of poems, here and now. An anthology can be a form of resistance. With our words that can change and recreate everything, we can start our own movement in this room.
Whenever the screens go quiet, Karaoğlu resumes his own account of marine mucilage (also known as “sea snot” or “sea saliva”) threatening to take over the entire Marmara Sea and his quixotic attempts at improving the situation. The artist’s monologues are regularly followed by on-screen instructions that call for the use of pencils and custom-made “notebooks” (imagine a deck of index cards, some of which are printed on one side with images). These audience tasks incrementally become more complex, and, at the end of the performance, they culminate in the final assignment of writing an entire poem.
Unlike a lot of the unsubstantiated, heady rhetoric around contemporary art, In Vain does not overly romanticize and upsell the power of poetry to effectuate change, even when Karaoğlu’s rhetoric occasionally appears to do just that. The artist does acknowledge how helpless he felt as a resident of Istanbul, while he anxiously watched mucilage cover ever greater expanses across the Marmara with its organic gooey blanket, thereby depriving the marine ecosystem underneath of access to crucial resources such as light and oxygen. Before settling on poetry as a potential combat tool for countering grave symptoms of climate change, Karaoğlu comes up with “all kinds of impossible plans to fight the mucilage.” Most notably, these include infiltrating a storage facility in the decommissioned Istanbul Atatürk Airport in order to steal the archaeological remains of an ancient vessel, “as if this old boat could communicate with mucilage and help us save the sea.”
To be sure, there is nothing self-evident about the proposed steal that will curb the overgrowth of mucilage, emboldened by rising water temperatures, rapid coastal urbanization, and carelessly discarded sewage waste. Compared to this outlandish act, writing poetry may appear more productive for Karaoğlu’s cause, and we learn, right off-the-bat at the beginning of In Vain, that it certainly does for him. It is possible to interpret Karaoğlu’s fanciful scenario of archaeological theft—its fleshedout presence alongside poetry—as a ruse, a narratological illusion of sorts, to rally faith behind his eventual weapon of choice. Although one is ultimately chosen over the other, I would argue that both courses of action are poetic acts for Karaoğlu: they require attunement to one’s environment, discerning patterns, and making unlikely connections to be with and sometimes go beyond the limits imposed by and on our eyes and minds. Facing the void of total desperation with hands tied behind our backs, it is not much but it’s a start.
In Vain is a house of mirrors; strange symmetries abound on its premises. For Karaoğlu, that might also be an apt description of time, and In Vain insists that the knowledge of time and its patterns can be harnessed to see into the future, if not create it. Besides their temporally spaced-out, geographic co-incidence in the environs of present-day Istanbul, the four screen-based characters have this in common: they all become intimately acquainted with what is going on around them, and reframe these phenomena as “clues” for accessing the past and the future.1 The vanished Tethys, of which the Marmara Sea remains a vestige, matter-of-factly proclaims:
I had witnessed every possible moment of so many lives for millions of years… Now as you go through little moments of your lives I can predict what is to come in every second. I had accumulated all the potential moments of life when I was a sea.
This wealth of knowledge, “the marvelous knowledge of the Tethys Sea,” endures, despite the disappearance of its progenitor. For those whose eyes are searching and hearts are yearning, it may appear as an enigmatic glow in the water.
After being sent to the Ottoman capital as a military attaché, the worldly and curious Marsili sees this glow on the Bosphorus and devotes a lifetime to studying the sign language of water, what it reveals—through color or fossils, for instance— about its past and even future.(2) Some three centuries later, Mahzuni Şerif catches sight of the same glow through the window of a courthouse in the seaside Beşiktaş district, where he is being tried for proudly avowing his minority (Alewite) identity.(3) He then molds this moment of deep realization into the song Boşu Boşuna, “where [his] words find their final resting place” shortly before the âşık’s death in 2002. However, someone else too witnesses the strong, waterborne glow on the same day as Mahzuni Şerif: the young Karaoğlu becomes captivated by the mysterious phenomenon during a class at the Kabataş Boys’ High School, and though it baffles him initially, he begins leaning into his newfound obsession with Mahzuni Şerif ’s works (particularly Boşu Boşuna), and “everything [starts] to make sense.” He tells himself that the vision he had “was the beginning of something,” and—yes, you too saw this coming—it eventually blossoms into In Vain.
There is a “plot point” that I failed to mention in the account above, because I want to single it out for defining my reading of signs and clues in Karaoğlu’s performance. It concerns the only moment of direct—albeit fleeting—contact, a rare convergence of spatial and temporal simultaneity, between two of the four characters. After having seen the glow from a classroom window, Karaoğlu is on his way home, and he spots a flock of journalists huddling around a figure at the entrance of the State Security Courthouse (Devlet Güvenlik Mahkemesi). It is the young man’s first encounter with Mahzuni Şerif. One journalist holds a microphone to the latter and asks: “Master poet, are you afraid?”
We—not even the viewer-participant-poets who have chosen to “stay” with the âşık or the artist’s younger self—do not hear his response, but we can easily guess which way it swings. Whatever the answer is or was, it would stem from a place of deep acceptance, a willingness to “embrace” the vicissitudes of reality “with four hands,” as the Turkish idiom goes, and do something with it… but without clinging onto the promise of a desired outcome. Although this stance may appear like a luxurious by-product of selfless optimism, it is more of a result of being on the (l)edge for too long, spending a lifetime under oppressive regimes in the developing world, maybe even giving up on Progress with a capital P. Change will come, for the better or not, in our lifetimes or not, and we can and should plant the seeds of our hearts’ desire, for “nothing is in vain.” This attitude can be woven into the fabric of lives and things, as Mahzuni Şerif did with Boşu Boşuna and the rest of his both heart-rendering and socially engaged oeuvre. It is also what the young Karaoğlu, coming of age “[i] n a geography that was weighted with a dreadful history,” professes having learned by “[keeping himself ] free of despair… [and trying] to respond to the words that surrounded [him].”
A few minutes into In Vain, Karaoğlu the narrator makes a distinction between hope and “discovery.” Having realized “stay[ing] hopeful… doesn’t help,” Karaoğlu spells out the lesson from the four “exhibits” he is putting before us: “Instead of hope and optimism, they made a discovery, each of them in a different way.” They all strived to better understand the significance of their discoveries, and once they solved the mysteries contained therein, Karaoğlu’s characters “inscribed [the truth of their discoveries] in their legacy, through their works.” Here, the artist describes the full arc of the creative act: “discoveries” come from a nurturing of one’s relation to the world; they are made to cohere—are interpreted—by and for the “discoverer;” finally, this processed and refined kernel of (what we can now call) subjective truth organically takes tangible form through the doings of the “discoverer” and is shared with the rest of the world.
Towards the end of the performance, the four characters join each other in chorus and insist: “there is only one meaning that everything in this room can arrive at. It is about to be here. You will choose to accept it or not. It is about the true meaning of everything. It is in this room.” However absolutist the refrain of “one true meaning” may sound, this assertion is not far-off for two reasons. First: these voices help comprise a specific truth, the outward expression of the truth Karaoğlu retrieved from his “discovery,” which includes gathering viewer-participant-poets in a room for his In Vain. And second: a truth isn’t a truth if it bears no relation to another truth. The basis of truth is therefore relationality—relationality stretched to its absolute limit to contain the entire universe—and in that sense, there can only be one truth.
Patterns come in handy in the midst of the creative act, for they let meaning coagulate and cohere, but they also remind us things are ever-changing. In the longue durée, repetition, renewal, and curious symmetries are bound to happen. We can only learn from these, and turn them into sources of inspiration, if not resilience: after all, patterns provide solace in the comfort that change will come.
YK-12 is the small Byzantine ship from around the 9th century, which Karaoğlu ventured out to steal in a desperate attempt to fight marine mucilage. Its remains had surfaced alongside those of thirty-six other shipwrecks during the Yenikapı excavations (2004–2013) accompanying the construction of a new underground transportation line. But YK-12 was the only vessel among them to be copied into a full-size replica, so that researchers could test and improve on new findings on medieval shipbuilding from the excavations; after more than a millennium of being buried and forgotten, YK-12—the re-materialized idea of YK-12—thus sailed the Bosphorus again in 2015.(4)
YK-12 could be retrieved, because its home, the fourth-century Theodosian Harbor, was destroyed. It was a gentle destruction from natural causes: the Lycus River (Bayrampaşa Deresi) had been gradually silting up the harbor basin for centuries, until the port could no longer handle robust maritime activity some time in the late 10th or early 11th century. Layers of silt and sand—the cause of the harbor’s disappearance—allowed the preservation of organic materials like wood, leather, and rope.(5) There is an interesting parallel between an ancient thoroughfare being accidentally re-discovered, as the newest one is being built. So is there another symmetry in taking shipwrecks from an ancient decommissioned transport hub and storing them in a much more recently decommissioned airport based on Karaoğlu’s account.⁶ On the metaphorical plane, other convergences arise: silting and mucilage, both waterborne phenomena, can change life in and around water as we have come to know it. Unlike the nutrient-dense silt of a healthy river, however, mucilage chokes native organic life of its resources; the parasitism of mucilage is in turn analogous to the tyranny of oppressive governments.
The people of Istanbul—and by extension, Turkey—have suffocated under the weight of an increasingly marauding, lawless, and vicious central government in especially the past decade and a half. Those of us who have the luxury and fortitude to leave, have done so rather than see their dreams and choices be crushed by small-minded, bottom-feeding, servile and hostile men of faintest intellectual and moral stature. Staying and making it work, particularly in the arts, has been nothing short of Sisyphean with a lot of losses along the way.
Karaoğlu’s In Vain strives to conjure clear-headedness about long-term battles by encouraging us to re-invest faith in our selves and words. “Prayers” the artist concedes, “are for hopes.” On the other hand, he continues, “[r]eal things happen through the words of invitations,” and presents a hypothetical: “Imagine a million people inviting others to meet them at the nearest park right now. Millions of people will suddenly go to the parks.” The ultimate referent of this example, the Gezi Park protests of 2013, won’t be lost on most people in the context of Turkey. While these may not have prevented Turkey’s descent into competitive authoritarianism, the Gezi Park still stands! It does not need to be excavated physically (like the Theodosian Harbor) or mnemonically in order to serve as a reservoir of meanings, experiences, and invitations for fostering life-affirming knowledge and relationality. Indeed, Karaoğlu’s choice of example is doubly meaningful, because the invitation involves shaking weights (or “dead earth” as we say in Turkish) off one’s shoulders, coming back into broad daylight, and living our lives out in public, together.
Invitations are all we need to accept and extend. When an utterance is “felicitous,” that is, if it leaves its fingerprints on our reality (the classic example is being pronounced “married”), it is called a performative.(7) Invitations, too, are performatives; the act of inviting comes to life and is over the moment it is verbalized. With In Vain, Karaoğlu places all his bets on performativity, the transformative capacity of creative endeavors (be it creating life, science, or art), but above all on a collective turn to poetry. The power of words is not to be underestimated: in her book Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, theorist Karen Barad shows that materiality (humans and other beings included!) is discursive based on historical, well-known experiments in physics.(8) According to Barad, “[d]iscourse is not what is said; it is that which constrains and enables what can be said. Discursive practices define what counts as meaningful statements.”(9) Poetry, as Karaoğlu champions it, is the expansion of what can be said, hence adding to the possibilities of what can be, tout court. But the process of writing poetry is also—paradoxically—a means of being in touch with the world and receiving it as is. In the bleakest, most oppressive of circumstances, poetry survives because of this fundamental paradox: when all hope is lost, poetry allows one to be here and there at the same time. It satisfies the need to accept the conditions, but also to be free of them and go places previously unknown, dangerous, and beautiful.
Theater scholar Ulrike Haß suggests the ancient Greek chorus predates theater, and its origins are to be found in archaic, rural rituals “honoring another world’s inaccessibility by way of a sacrifice… marking a border and respecting this border in a festive manner.”(10) Coming into the polis and entering the dramatic sphere, the chorus retains its strangeness. Its peculiarity becomes most clear in comparison to the protagonist, a later and distinctly urban phenomenon:
the chorus forms the place where differentiating takes place before difference, plurality comes before the collective, and metamorphosis before identity (while protagonists exercise asserting difference, collective, or identity).(11)
However deconstructed and fractured the four-part chorus of In Vain may be, it still fulfils the function of producing “infinite encounters” with the past and the future.(12) The Tethys Sea, Luigi Ferdinando Marsili, Âşık Mahzuni Şerif, and the young Onur Karaoğlu foreground the inevitability and constancy of change (differentiation and metamorphosis), and constitute a heterogeneous plurality, out of which a relational, cross-temporal, and non-hierarchical collectivity may be fashioned.(13) In Vain honors both the ability and the inability to change the world and makes an offering in the form of a collective anthology. If all revolutions do begin with accepting what has happened to us, this collective anthology is a call to arms—a call to arms to keep cherishing and expanding the realm of the possible, and to be in love with the world, no matter what.
CODA: As I am writing this essay, Turkey continues to witness the largest demonstrations in over a decade—since the Gezi Park summer—in support of Ekrem İmamoğlu, the extremely popular presidential candidate from the main opposition party and the mayor of Istanbul, who was arrested on March 19, 2025 on flimsy charges related to corruption and organized crime. Pointing to the wide and vigorous participation in these protests from virtually all demographic groups, political scientist Ezgi Başaran has described the situation as: “the wall of fear has cracked.”(14) May the crack follow its predestined course through the entire wall and may we once again remember nothing was or is in vain.
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