Broken II

"Broken II" is part of a series in which the Turkish artist Burçak Bingöl questions Turkish society and heritage, meshes its cultural and personal stories, deconstructs familiar everyday items then casts them in richly decorated ceramic artwork. Objects such as plain white bottles and tiles are cast and/or decorated in resonance with the traditions of the pre-modern Near East (Seljuq, Ottoman, and Safavid). Sometimes they are dashed on the floor – a violent act captured by the artist in a short video installation – and a selection of the shards are then reassembled and decorated. In "Broken II" irregularly broken ceramic pieces have been perpendicularly reassembled in a three-dimensional square panel. Utilizing the medium of floral-decorated stonepaste, this work connects to traditional ceramics and the colorful, decorative patterns created throughout the centuries in the Islamic world. The prominence given to roses relates especially to the Ottoman period and Iznik ceramics more specifically, wherein this flower appears prominently alongside tulips, hyacinths, and carnations, all of which are rendered in a stylized, rather than naturalistic, manner of those in "Broken II." This method of deconstructing a traditional Turkish artform or medium and then reassembling it into a contemporary object links both to Ottoman and Islamic artistic heritages and complicates the question of "what is art?" – Bingöl’s counter to Marcel Duchamp’s concept of "ready-made art."