You Tell Me

Video Program
Art and Desire Seminars, Istanbul, Turkey
June, 2010





The video screening program “You Tell Me”, which incorporates five videos by various artists and filmmakers, takes up the operational character of direct speech acts as a starting point to performatively intervene into the very space of the screening. As opposed to explanatory voice over, which describes and explicates through a naturalized narration, the operative aspects of direct speech acts reside in their power to intervene and change an existing situation, which in the case of this screening program comprises of the audience sitting in a dark room and watching the selected videos.

The videos selected here participate in performative speech acts, which either reiterate an authoritative structure or mark the collapse of this very structure through a failed performative utterance. These utterances are never autonomous or subjective. In J.L. Austin’s example of performatives, when the minister announces a couple as husband and wife, the performative power of his speech is neither reflection nor expression of the minister’s autonomous will, but rather a pronouncement of a predetermined and pre-established social convention. Similarly, in Althusser’s notion of interpolation, it is not the policemen as a carrier of an autonomous subjective will whose pronouncement “Hey, You!” interpolates the subject. Instead, the very utterance of the policemen is always already an authoritative voice of the police as social institution. Then, the utterance is not expressive but rather operative. It is this operative and performative character of the works that abandon the tired interpretative question “What does the work mean?” to pose the question “What does the work do?”

1.Hassan Khan, Rant, 6’45’’, 2008

In Hassan Khan’s Rant the subject is both caught up within and threatened by socialbility, or even by the mere implication of the other. In this highly staged and meticulously choreographed video a subject of an indefinite age and sex enacts relationships that are both highly personal but also formalistic and professional. Nevertheless, the subject is self-fulfilled and self-contained, thus every utterance turns into a rant. As Khan states in his article: “A rant is a hyper-expressive condition—utterances shoot out at an accelerated pace, the subject’s delivery outstrips its desires, the expression is caught up in its own presence and fails to reflect one’s intention, hence the stutter and the breathlessness of hyperventilation. We are therefore always one step behind. Here, what would normally take less than a minute is slowed down to a dense narcotic six-minute confessional and stylized disclosure. The rhetorical construction of a speech act unfolds over a numbed-out musical composition. Although the nature of causality treats each utterance as more than only itself, we have here a syntagm that derives its polyvalence from its material conditions—from the conditions of its appearance.”

2. Aras Ozgun, Can I? 3’2’’, 2002

Aras Ozgun’s “Can I” can be described as an sort of “accidental video”, which emerges from what could be termed as a pre-speech act. The video is comprised of a confused question “Can I” uttered by Avital Ronell, Freudian theorist and philosopher just before her planned interview by arno bohler and susanne granzer Ozgun has utilized this recorded waste and repeated the question pronounced by Ronnel multiple times, and replaced one of the ready-made words with other “ready-made” words which are key to Ronell’s theoretical framework and pronounced during the interview “proper”. This accidental pre-speech act turns into a digitally manipulated voice over, which is nevertheless uttered by the subject directly. This creates a gap between intentionality and accident, meaning and a conglomeration of words that refuse to enter into semiosis.

3. Shady El Noshakaty Stammer: A Lecture in Theory, 12’, 2007

Similarly, Shady El Noshakaty’s video also explores this ambiguity between intentionality and its collapse. In his video and performance series Stammer El Noshakaty incessantly and persistently is trying to read scientific definitions. However, overcome by affect or emotions the source of which is impossible to identify, El-Noshakaky stammers, whines, cries, pauses. The language here is caught up somewhere between expression and communication, or rather, betrays its promise to deliver meaning, and specifically, to reproduce and perpetuate the rationalized scientific language.

4. Lusine Chergeshtyan, Puzzle, 3’32’’, 2009

Lusine Chergeshtyan’s work radically differs from the previous works, since it is entirely textual. The phenomenological experience of the reader is produced through a simple editing of a running text, and specifically, manipulating the pace of this text. However, what it shares with all the previous videos, is yet again the betrayed promise of language to deliver meaning. In Chergeshtian’s Puzzle the female speech turns into a hemorrhage, which on the one hand, conveys a specific experience, but on the other hand, refuses the reader’s access to this experience. At the point of reception, but never utterance, this speech turns into a hysterical cry, as the running text literally escapes from the reader.

5. Wael Shawky, The Cave, 12’42’’, 2005

Cairo based artist Wael Shawky’s controversial video from 2005, the Cave, decontextualizes an authoritatively structured speech, namely a Koranic surrah uttered by the artist himself, without edits or cuts, without flows or scrambles and with a tone of clerical seriousness in a supermarket in Amsterdam. Here, we not only have a rupture between the context of the utterance and the structure and content of the utterance, but also between time and space. The Cave here refers both to the Koranic verse, Plato’s famous metaphor of the Cave and a contemporary space of spectacular consumption.