Nilbar Güreş :
ATEM

Luisa Ziaja

The surreal play between the thingness of the body and the corporeality of things characterizes many of Nilbar Güreş’s photographs, objects, collages, drawings, videos, and paintings. In 2021, she explored this in her first installation in the public realm, which was a kinetic sculpture on the late medieval fortified tower in the town of Perchtoldsdorf near Vienna. Güreş likes to explore the question of how we inhabit the world: in other words, which norms and patterns of behavior we follow, which roles we are ascribed, in what way we are shaped by society in the course of our lives, how we interact with our immediate environment, and how we relate to our historical heritage and to global developments.

Güreş’s works juxtapose a worldview that is structured by dualities—nature vs. culture, mind vs. body, subject vs. object, human vs. not human, self vs. other, man vs. woman, what is part of my identity vs. what is alien to me—with poetic, subtly ironic, and humorous worlds of imagination, revealing that what we perceive as given is actually made, thus undermining such assumptions in a light-footed way. She achieves this through a conceptual synergy of the materials, motifs, gestures, and the stories she employs. Her favorite materials are textiles in the broadest sense—from delicately woven silk, through raw sheep’s wool, knitted, crocheted, and stitched things, to clothes or artisanal objects—all in a small, or, as in this case, a monumental format. Textiles are an inexhaustible source of inspiration for the artist; they are media that can transcend time and space. They are capable of establishing connections to past times and cultures and of evoking our present daily life in a historical context.

The site of Güreş’s intervention is charged in multiple ways. The impressive structure with its height of about 60 meters (c. 200 feet) is not only the largest remaining fortified tower in Austria and has had many different uses over the last 500 years—for example, as a fortified tower (during the first siege of the Ottomans), a watchtower, a church and bell tower, as well as a city and clock tower—it also has an identifying and identity-forming function in the local context. In Güreş’s work, titled Atem (Breath), airbags made of balloon silk protrude from three windows of the landmark tower that can be seen from afar. These balloons with a diameter of four meters regularly fill with air and empty again, as if the structure were breathing.

A key starting point for the artist’s thoughts—in which the history and function of the tower are reflected and anchored in the present—was not a focus on defense, but on protection as relating to the question of how we can protect ourselves without endangering others. How have dangers and our strategies for dealing with them changed over time? In our everyday, motorized lives, the airbag, for example, serves as a possible metaphor for protection from severe injuries during impact. Güreş took the form of a bag filled with air and enlarged it to a monumental size as “breathing balloons.” As a conceptual drawing by the artist shows, she understands the built space between the balloons as the “lung” of the structure.

Public art has the special quality of being unintentionally stumbled upon by us, its viewers, as we go about our day-to-day lives. It is where contemporary artistic practices realize their full potential to confound our view of and our perspective on the things that surround us, to change these temporarily or permanently, or to perceive these things differently and integrate them into our lives in a new way. This is precisely what Güreş’s intervention on the fortified tower does. She makes the landmark visible as an important figure of the visual appearance of Perchtoldsdorf and gives this “thing” the kind of corporeality that was mentioned in the beginning: a corporeality that hints at its having a life of its own. Animated things have occupied the artist for a long time, not least because of the Kurdish and Alevi culture in her family background. Animism in the sense of a belief that everything has a spiritual essence means that things possess an invisible power and can intuitively build bridges to our feelings, desires, the past, and events—in other words, they have something alive and corporeal about them. The connection between breath and life can be seen in the German word for breath, atem, which is derived from the Latin animus/anima (which also means “spirit” or “life”). In this way, the well-known stony witness of this town appears awakened, breathing, literally animated, thereby letting the topographical unconscious become conscious. As a vessel communicating between history and the present time, Güreş’s intervention on the fortified tower in Perchtoldsdorf is about permanence and transformation, vulnerability and resilience.