Huo Rf

Each floor of a Ten-Floor Apartment building is named after a woman that had an involvement in Huo Rf’s life between 1992 and 2002. Neighborhood relations, friendships and repetitive days all converge to form a layer of memories related to his childhood and turns into an apartment of these memories.

• - Site; means group of buildings housing related units, building complex.

Huo Rf’s artwork series titled Güven Sitesi brings together different discourse, texts, and paroles. These discourse or paroles are sometimes just names, sometimes they are sentences from speeches, we already heard, and sometimes just words. The first work of the series connects names of women he is familiar with since his childhood. He builds an imaginative building consisting of seven floors and names each floor after names of women who are actually his mother’s neighbors from his childhood home. Artist also uses his mother’s name who resided in this building. That’s how this series of artwork earns its name: Güven Apartmanı. He continues his series with a touch from his life and the second artwork of the series comes as names again. This time the artist connects the names of women from his professional life. These women (all from Turkey's art scene) touched his life somehow in different periods. We see indicators and signs from his life with the help of these names and as he uses language, words, and texts, he offers a new kind of meta-language.

Later on, he decides to take on another journey, and his signs (as in linguistics and semiotics) become sentences, meanings, and clauses in the artwork. Sometimes these are sentences he heard from a popular TV Show, which was focusing on gender apartheid, and sometimes sentences are taken from Tomris Uyar's poem. Sentences come after one another and all of them stand as signs of ideas or experiences. For instance, artwork from the series titled, 'A Ten Floor Apartment - Apartment of Words' is filled with ideas that come together as sentences. These sentences, on the other hand, do not have any subjects and the undefined subject incident makes Huo Rf’s clauses full of non-subjects.

The contexts with “non-subjects”, determined according to the “Theory of Instances” by Jean-Claude Coquet (1997; 2007), are categorized based on “Typology of Non-subjects”. Later on, this theory was adopted and compiled by Professor Öztürk Kasar for the semiotics of translation analysis. In this sense, Kasar defines non-subject as ‘discourses in which the subjects are not aware of the sayings’. The subject may say many sentences during this unaware state. However, the subject is not responsible for these discourses cause he or she (the subject) is not aware of what he or she is saying at the moment. Professor Kasar divides these non-subject clauses into different categories. These non-subjects lack awareness or judgment.

The Güven Sitesi series is a perfect example of the relation defining language and semantics. On the other hand, it makes us question these non-subjects. Huo RF creates a meta-language and discovers subjects, signs, and semantic lengths. The artworks give us subjects who exist in the middle of communal or patriarchal problems, or we witness the sorrow or the pain they feel by poetry (as in the artwork titled Apartman Tomris), sometimes these non-subjects are in the middle of existential crisis and Huo RF makes us discover them with this meta-language of artworks.

A non-subject in the middle of manifestations... An overture for Güven Sitesi

We tend to understand everything we see, touch, or feel by creating meanings through language. Language helps us to develop the meaning behind every experience. It is impossible to find meaning without clauses, sentences, and linguistic approaches. In another way, semantics become an information field of the imaginative discourse between viewer and artist. In this field, meaning does not come from our mental representational images (ideas)... Meaning is the main idea that comes within the language. When we look around everything that we already know (or what we thought we already have known) comes within the language content. In this way, meaning makes us realize what we are and our own existence. When the meaning is reduced to a single word, the meaning may define many things as the subject is part of the world of signs. That’s how the subject falls in and then exits from ambushes of language and meaning, folds the subject into its claws and frees it ... This somehow becomes a relation of acceptance.

That's how the artist allows the viewer to fall into ambushes of meaning and language in his series of artworks Güven Sitesi. His usage of words, sentences, names come from the world of signs. However, his subjects are non-subjects. All of his sentences, their meanings, and clauses are destined to be connected to only one thing and this is his made-up building Güven Sitesi. This series of work is a story of reading, discourse, manifestation, and experience of observation. All these subjects somehow talk within each other and with the viewers. The artist develops discourses for certain phenomena and these discourses are designed as sentences and clauses. As Roland Barthes said; most of the time, in fact, all the time we read and we forget and he said he reads in order to forget. He claimed that we should not worry about not remembering. All of these are depending on the language that we are destined to add meanings to things. We read and we create meanings, all of the words, names become a part of the cycle of reinterpretation, and here at that moment, a vicious cycle begins. That’s how each artwork in the Guven Sitesi series becomes meaningful. On one hand, sentences exist within their own meanings and on the other, they free themselves from acknowledged meanings that we already have known. The viewer begins to interpret the words and meanings. The meaning in the text is only existing in the nominative and subjective field and we thought for a moment we have found the meaning as we witness ambushes of the language and the usage of it.

While Huo Rf is depicting social phenomenon, he uses meanings from rhetoric and allows us to observe this field of ambush. In this risky field, there are no tune and order of the text, but only its reality. It is singular but Huo RF makes it a plural interpretation. The text is full of meta meaning and connotations. The text tends to change within a discursive field and make us forget what we have already known, learned, and seen. At last, it offers a new reading and interpretation.

Semiotics and Güven Sitesi building

Huo Rf uses an apartment as an indicator and he searches for the purest meaning of sentences, words, clauses, and discourses. Who are these women living in this apartment, they speak, they become silent, they all have their own sorrows, they try to add meaning to this life... In short, we discover how these subjects (of sentences, texts, characters, women in the buildings), view life as they develop the language, develop their discourse... In this sense, the artist creates meta meaning and meta- language and he aims to use this meta-language for subjects while adopting this meta-language only for an artistic narrative. The subject in his text is non-subject, who tries to refind herself again and again and lost her center again and again. That’s why this subject’s priority is never the meaning that the artist creates. The most important thing is their existence at the moment. They use the purity of the language and they try to find their ways in the ambush. That’s why we try to find meaning through their existence and reality. This becomes an endless effort for the viewer. Artist on the other hand tries to make us forget and reinterpret meanings and reality. He brings us the things we forget and his meta-language becomes an offer. This is an offer from semiotics and in this offer meaning is only related to the real world.

The meta-language of Huo Rf is another attempt or effort. He brings together normal people, a normal phenomenon that we witness each day, he brings together the poems we already know and he aims to give a field of purity for his non-subjects as he opens a new way of re-expressing themselves. However, ambushes of meaning once again are at work. The viewer knows the limits of the relation between the artist and his subjects, but only within a limited capacity and that’s because this change is like an utterance. Silent and meaningful...

Huo Rf tries to make his non-subjects without getting into ambushes of the languages. He creates a kingdom of signs and he gives freedom to his subjects, they have the chance to live within this meta-language. The building is an existential stance. All the subjects he created belong to this existential field and they enjoy being non-subject. In this field, their identity is not important. They are just an utterance and ambushes for those who search for the meaning. And we as readers and viewers got caught in these ambushes and became a part of the non-subject world and meta-language. Artist creates a grapheme as he leaves the changes, fluidity, and uncertainty of the text and opens new dimensions for us to re-discover the non-subjects again, just like re-interpreting and remembering.

Life continues like it is a meaning caught in the ambush...

Hatice Utkan Özden, İstanbul, January 2021

Building No. 19 (A New Apartment), is the second piece of the series titled Güven Sitesi which the artist has been working on since 2017. Each apartment on the series brings together all the women who influenced the artist's practice from his childhood until today, through his cultural neighbour relations.

Therapy Apartment brings together the notes that the artist has taken during his therapy sessions for the past year and turns into a structure of questioning and a process of seeing what is beyond.