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Tribunal – A MATTER OF EMOTION
(Burak Bektaş no echo in front of my shout)
Curated by Anguezomo Mba Bikoro
June 2018, SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin
‘Burak Bektaş No Echo in front of My Shout’ was a durational performance presented in June 2018 at SAVVY Contemporary gallery in Berlin. It was curated by performance artist Nathali Bikoro.
The performance was a piece of art in response to the murder of Burak Bektaş a young German from a Turkish family, who was killed by a neo-nazi in Berlin.
In the middle of the night of April 05, 2012, a white gunman opened fire on a group of young immigrants on Rudower Straße. He killed Burak Bektaş and seriously injured two of his friends. The murderer was never identified. There are many questions about the police investigation that were never answered. And the demands of the family were simply ignored by the police and authorities in Berlin.
The police announced that their effort at finding the murderer had been unsuccessful. They covered up the case and used their power to criminalize his family by observing them as if they had committed a crime and accusing Burak of ties to criminals. Since then, Melek Bektaş, Burak’s mother, has been continuing to plead her son’s case before the public. She has challenged the system by means of public statements, demonstrations, and establishing a memorial sculpture where Burak was assassinated. In all these efforts, she has been accompanied by activists from the Burak Bektaş Association. Since that time, Burak’s mother and his family have been resisting and fighting for clarification and an independent investigation. Sadly, after the police covered up this case, neo-nazis have been emboldened to attack other immigrants, their shops and stores, activists’ cafes, and houses in the district of Neukölln. Burak Bektas’s family believes that Luke Holland’s murderer, a neo-nazi who was later arrested by police for this murder, killed their son as well. Witnesses of each murder describe a person who did not quickly flee, but rather left the crime scenes slowly.
The performance took place in the center of the main space of SAVVY Contemporary Gallery. Melek Bektaş was present at the exhibition and stayed with us for a half-hour. She also gave us a written statement for the artist talk. The performance started at 10:30 in the morning. I performed without a break, without leaving the space, and without eating or drinking anything until the performance ended at 8 o’clock in the evening.
This performance involved melting two large blocks of ice. In this piece of art, the ice needed to melt, to change into its previous form–it needed to become water. A need that exhibits and shows the metaphor of moving of emotion. A metaphor that could let and guide the audience to embody it into their own body and take a response action for the history of Burak and similar cases. With the audience, we had to get the safety pins out of the ice and we could only do it by melting it. We used the pins we got out to attach small photos of Burak to the audience’s shirts or to a thin horizontal rope strung between the walls and under the ceiling of the gallery. We used our own bodies to melt the ice. I stood on the ice and warmed it with my bare feet. The audience participated by rubbing their warm hands on the ice. It was painful, sensitive, and intensive work by many visitors and participants.
The ice was produced in 20 days time specifically for this performance. The company that made the blocks of ice was the only one able to do it. The process of preparing this material took every minute of every day’s work by the employees there. The company didn’t allow me to observe the process of producing this essential material. Putting over seven hundred safety pins in 240-kilogram blocks of ice in such a short time was a central part of the preparation in the weeks before the performance.
Around one hundred people visited this piece of work. Some of them sat and watched the work for hours, and some of them melted the ice with me.
During the performance I was surrounded, watched, and supported by the audience, New people joined the audience constantly. They gathered around the ice or watched other videos and looked at objects.
The performance finished at 8pm in the evening and we opened the space for an artist’s talk.
Most of the ice melted during the performance and the rest of it during our artist’s talk.
Besides the performance in the gallery, a pot of soup was exhibited on a table. Melek Bektaş had decided to present a memorial sculpture for her son in the city. And she had to collect 40 thousand euros for that. To collect donations for it, she cooked soup and gave it to the activists and volunteers to sell every year at a Christmas market in Berlin. For this exhibition, I asked her to share this part of her struggles and stories with us. Over a course of 10 Hours, the soup was warmed up by small candles under the pot. The candles created a bright corner in the space to the right of the gallery’s doorway with a beautiful, fascinating orange light. That was supposed to remind the audience of a her battle with impossible hurdles, such as the cost of the bronze sculpture, the negotiations with the city of Berlin for a small green space to place it there, and a peaceful form of communicating her son’s story and reminding them what had happened. She and activists distributed information about her son at the market handing out many brochures about Burak’s story as well. Next to the food, a documentary video of Melek Bektaş was projected on a large board. The video documentary was one of her speeches to a large audience in Tribunal-NSU Complex Kölln in 2017, where I met her for the first time and where we spoke.
