MUTE IMAGES

“Mute Images” aims to explore how video language has changed based on the works of Ferhat Özgür. The exhibition sets out to display the use of images by a contemporary artist who studied painting and worked in the academy within the same field and indirectly understand the “language” of video image through the transformation of that image. The journey of the image within the regime of representation is under scrutiny through his photographs and videos.

Contemporary French philosopher J. Ranciere analyzes the fundamental epistemic breakup  within the regime of representation through “mute speech”. In literary theory this is the exact moment when oral literature gives way to reading by eye sweeping. This transformation, which is simultaneously the episteme of modernism according to Ranciere, is the shift from verbal narrative of the experience into the visual narrative of the impression. Ranciere's definition fully accounts for the 1960’s in terms of video art. The post 1990, however, witness an opposite tendency in which video opts for storytelling to explain the image. While it was the image that turns mute speech into meaning in recent past, in today’s video it is the word that turns mute image into meaning. Originality of Ferhat Özgür's videos owes much to this shift. “Mute Images”, in a microcosm, delves into the oscillation of the language between language and speechlessness.