SILA CANDANSAYAR

Pause for a moment to think about memory, and you may well find yourself considering Cicero’s classic text, Ad Herennium, more commonly known as The Art of Memory. Central to any academic study or scientific understanding of memory as a foundational skill, in the book Cicero draws a singular distinction which, one might say, haunts the very idea of recollection to this day: “There are, then, two kinds of memory: one natural, and the other the product of art.” Of course, Cicero meant artifice rather than art, and was referring to a kind of memory aided by the construction of a psychological space, a memory palace within which one could deposit any information for later absolute recall.

With No Place Like Home, the Turkish-born, Paris-based artist Sila Candansayar turns our understandings of Cicero’s memory palace on its head. Beginning with a wry assertion that the allegorical is as anchored as its intention, Candansayar challenges us to negotiate an idea masquerading as a place. Across a series of works that repeat and redefine cardboard, steel, PLA plastic, silicone, Plexiglas, mahogany, and more – Candansayar challenges viewers to take metaphorical steps, cross imagined thresholds, journey to unfamiliar places.

Her works become sites where the familiar and the imaginary intersect: the figure of the Sahmeran, the mythical Turkish ruler of snakes, both literally and figuratively. The former emerges in a work entitled Serpent, where idea and form intertwine, while more figuratively we see some form of sahmeran repeat so we can imagine the intersections of serpent and person. Sahmeran (cœur), sahmeran (bras), sahmeran (corps), sahmeran (tête), sahmeran (queue). Heart. Arms. Body. Head. And not line, but tail. Candansayar’s snakes never truly solidify as serpents, their fragments like building blocks, elements of our larger whole, our corp(u)s, our shared body, our site in space, our sense of place.

As importantly, her bodies are always already in motion, always transforming, on the path toward becoming that other thing. Much as a snake sheds its skin, Candansayar’s figures climb, cross, span, elevate. Each is on the verge of a revelation, as she explains a Jodorowskian use of gestures and actions to facilitate a traumatic release. That Alma Jodowrowsky should appear as Stéphane Parry in the recent miniseries The Serpent only reinforces the idea. For Candansayar, release comes through repetition, through the reconstruction and reimagination of a pure form, the sphere, which she reinterprets and reconstructs at varying sizes and in various colors. Each is always on the verge of changing, becoming disorder from stasis, shifting from its seeming simplicity into that thing in motion which can neither be contained nor defined.

Part of the sublime beauty of Candansayar’s works is her insistence on reminding us that we require both regularity and simplicity to feel comfortable in what we perceive. Yet her spheres are hidden, set inside cardboard cutouts, forming bases for cardboard box sculptures, teetering precariously on short plinths, pedestals, and protrusions, while her other familiar shapes, those square and rectangular boxes, are always broken by something emerging, a cut, or a rupture – some aspect or element that shatters our expectations of pure geometry and thwarts every attempt to create a gestalt. Both on the practical and metaphorical levels, Candansayar issues a challenge that we synthesize two types of volume. One, created by an object in space; the other, created by the resonance of expectations and the sounds of our own psyches.

Add in the ideas of safety and displacement – the tautological, Dorothyesque dictum of “no place like home,” and we find another foundation upon which Candansayar constructs space. Just as each of us is constrained by location, she challenges us to find site, safety, and comfort within those very things that threaten us: serpents, the mind, the heart, and the body.

Beyond geometry, her materiality challenges us to consider persistence and decay. Steel and plastic, cardboard and wood. Each exists as potential, yet each is already expressing what it wants to say. Two materials making the same shape. Two sides of the same piece of paper. Two interpretations of the same work, two vocalizations of the same word. And at the center of it all? Play. That which, in Candansayar’s world, is the pure opportunity to reveal interpretation and identity. Or, more simply, to step into space with the belief that it may be possible to experience a shared idea of place. It may be allegorical, metaphorical, or metaphysical, but the willingness to find location through interpretation sits at the center of Sila Candansayar’s invitation to acknowledge that there is no place like home.

Text: Brett Levine