Representations of everyday life in İnci Eviner’s We, Elsewhere: comedy, use and free will

Abstract

İnci Eviner's installation We, Elsewhere 1 for the Turkey Pavilion 2 at the 58th Venice Art Biennial offers a spectacle of the incomplete, in which the objects, videos and their characters, and sounds in the piece, along with the exhibition space itself, consist all of halves, missing something. It is designed as a non-place in the midst of nowhere, which appears as a liminal space of exception, in which the inside and outside become indistinct. In this respect, the role of the large ramp, which transgresses the public-private divide, is particularly remarkable for it both connects and disconnects the place in relation to the outside, incarnating a paradoxical form of inclusionary exclusion. One cannot avoid noticing the ramp on entering the pavilion: cut horizontally and vertically, the spaces between left void, it is a cross-sectional space experienced through its corridors, area closed off by metal bars, a semi-closed room and viewing area arranged on stairs. However, its interior is rendered visible through the cross-sections of buildings and the subterranean. We bear witness to the events inside it, and, ceasing to be spectators, participate in the installation. Through this displacement, we also move from a representational space to a lived space.