Nezaket Ekici: Emotion in Motion (detail)
When it was pointed out to me, at the Art Monthly Christmas drinks party, that I had a smear of lipstick in my face, I was able to give an answer rather wasted on a non-paramour: Ah yes, I was kissed by a Turkish performance artist. She was Nezaket Ekici and her performance is part of a lively retrospective (After) Love at Last Sight at the welcome new Turkish-run Pi Artworks (55 Eastcastle St to 25 Jan). I had no call to feel privileged, as she was kissing everything – the gallery walls mostly, but also furniture, vases, photographs, cushions – in a three day performance which had already made her lips and chin sore by the first afternoon. Yet, Nezaket said, she doesn’t see endurance as an integral part of the work in the way of her teacher, Marina Abramovic, but simply does what’s necessary to reach her desired result. That instant kiss was of a piece with the press release’s citing Walter Benjamin’s idea of ‘love at last sight’ as typical of city life’s fleeting encounters, in which ‘the final farewell coincides with the moment of allure’. Lip marks have some painterly aspects – uniquely personal, yet different every time, flirting with serialism, yet resisting it – but they lack paint’s permanence: by the time I got home, there was nothing left to explain to my wife.
Nezaket Ekici: Emotion in Motion
Most days art Critic Paul Carey-Kent spends hours on the train, traveling between his home in Southampton and his day job in Surrey. Could he, we asked, jot down whatever came into his head?
