Huo Rf

Spotlight

Where does one lay one’s head at night when the world is in the grip of a pandemic? Appeals to “stay home” echoed across the globe in early March 2020. Yet it became clear, rather quickly, that being able to stay indoors was the privilege of some, whilst others, essential workers, were left unprotected and exposed. Others still found themselves without the means to make a living, to pay rent or cover basic necessities. For many the “home” would be just as treacherous, or perhaps more so: Instead of the scene of tranquility and protected domesticity it would be the space of violence, both structural and physical. Hayat Eve Sığar – Life fits into the Home – the slogan chosen by the Turkish government to create good will and adherence to social distancing rules rang problematically too, for so many of the LGBTI+ community, for feminists, and rights activist, that is those communities for whom moments of crisis and joy are fundamentally about assemblage and coming together, for sociabilities and socialities outside the fold. It remains one of the heartbreaking features of the pandemic that love and care, political and personal, have been reliant on staying apart, as best as possible.

Spotlight shows the indent of a head laid to rest, not on a pillow, or the comfort of a bed but on a plastic canister, once filled with cleaning fluid used to sanitize surfaces. Over the past year, such sanitizing has become a ritual, a largely compensatory practice projecting control and performative self-assurance in face of an airborne virus. A little residue of the fluid is still left… Spotlight is the result of happenstance, telling the story of an unplanned – and wordless – encounter of the artist and another young man. The artist on his way to work in an arts institution in Beyoğlu, Istanbul, the young man, returning from his hometown, after Turkey’s first lockdown. With the closure of his workplace, a nightclub located in the same building, his means to make a living had found an abrupt end. In the summer of 2020, he had ventured back on account of the news that “openings” were immanent, not yet aware that nightlife, bars and clubs especially, would be bracketed out from the lifting of restrictions. Not yet aware that the job he had left in the spring, as a barkeeper would not materialize again, at least for some time.

The photograph captures the plastic bin as found, under a spotlight that together with an armchair and a desk once made for the security check of the nightclub. It encapsulates and evokes, with gentle precision, some of the precarities and vulnerabilities that the pandemic has engendered and deepened. Some of these precarities and vulnerabilities have been highlighted repeatedly since the beginning of the pandemic – and yet remain unaddressed by the state, and, despite all solidarities, invoked and practiced, by society at large. Spotlight raises questions as to what one is to return to “after” the pandemic. An “after” that because of the unevenness in responses and globalized inequalities stands to be less a collective moment of relief and rejoice, but a drawn-out replay of privileges and vulnerabilities, celebrated landmarks and turning points for some, indeed the few, continual sacrifice for the death cult of capitalism for others, especially those in the ‘informal economy,’ the service sector, and on the factory floor.

At first sight, Spotlight seems like a departure from Huo Rf’s previous body of work. A photograph rather than the embodied practice of sketching that continues to nurture his conceptual works and storytelling. It is a record of a fleeting encounter, first in person as the young man on the armchair awakes from his sleep, and then the next day, by way of an object. The indented plastic canister distills a whole world into an object, or rather into the traces of a person left on that object. Appropriated to serve as something other than intended, the plastic canister’s comfort is surely limited as is its potential to offer restful sleep.

Huo Rf called it a piece of “handmade furniture” when we spoke, made into bedding out of material that is not pliable and yet gives, just a little, not least because it mostly has been emptied, and is soon to be disposed. In this way, Spotlight is less of a coincidence than it leads on. Huo Rf’s works have a pronounced line that connects his individual endeavors with writing and publishing as pathways to collaborative thinking and making, expressing and relating, often through the vehicle of invitation. The publishing project border_less, for instance, emerged from such invitations and interlocutions. And it is interlocution that allows to unearth the story of the plastic canister. Huo Rf’s latest works are centered on ceramics that are broken, pieces that at first sight might be identified as disposable, as trash. He is thinking of repair, of preservation, and of possible assemblages to create something new. Whatever the “after” of the pandemic will be, it will be marked by impasses in terms of the possibilities of repair. The lives lost, many avoidably so, the economic and existential hardships and the damages to the ties between “us” that are already all too fragile, will be hard to mend.

There is an almost unbearable loneliness in the photograph, the “pillow” of a young man who has no other place to go. “Home is where you lay your head” is a well-rehearsed saying in English, one that does not hold true in such uninhabitable places and times. Spotlight is a humble, heart-wrenching record of such times. But it is also the expression of the wish, the desire for a dignified live – and a home.

Banu Karaca

Translation: Gülşah Mursaloğlu

Poster Design: Eren Su Kibele Yarman

Video Documentation: Ilgar Gökhan & Oytun Yönyüksel

Special thanks to:

Melek & Ferhan Gençer, Hüma Kabakçı, Defne Tulga, Zülal Gülçur, Neslihan Başer, Merve Akar Akgün & Refik Akgün, Mehveş Dramur, Serra Yentürk, Sinan Baştaş & Arzu Komili Baştaş, Altay Fereli, Mert Ünsal, Özkan Özdoğan, Selim Bilen, Asena Doğan Kal Kal & Uday Kal Kal.

Huo Rf, October - November, İstanbul 2021 ©