"Has everything already been said? Are we only able to quote from now on?
Is the meaning of art to question what is new?"
Dr. Andreas Dammertz (exhibition sheet)


This text will be about an exhibition I went in October 2010 in Berlin from the Turkish artist Nezaket Ekici.
This artist is the owner of the DNA art gallery in Auguststraße where her exhibition took place.
The exhibition presented two works dealing with the relation between the original and the quotation.
One of the works was the installation "Form it able". This was derived from a live performance on the 10th of August 2010 in Theaterforum Kreuzberg. The first floor of the gallery was occupied with the relics from that performance: pedestals, music stands, images of the masterpieces that were created during the past centuries in the course of the art history, a screen showing the video documentation of the performance.
The only element that was missing in the gallery was the 14 models that performed the piece. 
This work is a quotation in itself. During the performance in the theatre, the audience was asked to put the models above the pedestals in the same position of the images of the art history masterpieces. Its really interesting that the models didnt play an active role. The audience constructed all the performance.
In the gallery, the visitors are supposed to go to the empty pedestals and imitate the position of the characters on the image beside it.
On the gallery's ground floor there was another installation "Defiant" derived from a live performance that Nezaket Ekici did during the exhibition opening. She was in a pedestal, in front of a huge projection space wearing a dress covered by 4000 toothpicks. 
"The projection space as well as her movements can be observed at the same time so that the original and the quotation seem to melt into each other. But the spiky dress functions symbolically as an obstacle that ensures that the observer does not get too much closed to the phenomenon of quoting and the original: the dress keeps the audience in distance.
The original and the quotation meet each other on one spot without any distinction."
I found the concept behind this art piece interesting. The reflection about the original and the quotation is still important in art. 
I don't believe in a completely original artwork, this would be something without significance.
All new creations are an addiction of elements and questions to the art history or they are transformations of the past meanings into new meanings. But past is still there and its based in what happened in the past that we are able to construct the present.
History is always being repeated but this repetition is made in different forms.
This work was showing how the original depends on the quotation to exist. 
But this exhibition made me think about other questions too.
I liked the game she did between different spaces. How she played with the work in the theatre and how she presented that in the gallery after that. She was changing the conventional rules of the theatre and then, of the gallery. 
In the theatre the performers were models like moving sculptures. But they were not acting. They were completely dependent of the audience. They were like objects for the audience to manipulate. 
The audience did the performance based on the images of art history positioning the models in the right places. This performance was at the same time the imitation and recreation of the artwork from old masters.
On the other hand, I really enjoyed the way she positioned the relics from the performance in the gallery. The white pedestals were diffused in the room and the images were beside them. When I entered there, I had immediately the sensation that something was missing and I was trying to understand what it was. After I saw the video documentation from the performance in the theatre I understood that it was for the visitors to complete the piece creating a second performance with the same elements but in a different context. 
As I worked in public space I usually think how to move the work from there to a gallery or a theatre. What are the possibilities to transfer a work from one context to another? I think the video documentation is for sure a way to do it, but I found that it should be used as a complement to the meaning of a new work created for that places.
This new work should add something to the concept of the documented work.The elements used in the performance are another possibility. Each one of the elements has a specific meaning and they get a kind of aura to have been used as part of a performance. After the performance they are like small art pieces derived from a bigger art piece. And its amazing how you can play with their meanings to create a new artwork based in the past artwork. Once again, the original don't exist. Its the result of the past transformed in the present.