M HKA Ensembles

Artist Novel, 13.5 x 19.5 cm, 128 p, language: Turkish, publisher: Norgunk, ISBN: 9789758686858.

Collection: Collection M HKA, Antwerp (Inv. no. B 2030/313).

Literary synopsis

Loyelow pursues a character of our post-modern world as he sails the wind of his encounters after he loses his loved one, one day, in a city that is under construction of neoliberalism, and authoritarianism. Macho and racist, the male gaze which restrains him are the gendarme, the guerrilla, the rapists but also the bell boys, the kitchen maids, the unemployed. Not knowing how to mourn, the unnamed protagonist seeks refuge in chaotic streets as his road trip builds into a set of consequences that enforce him to surrender to all that is happening. A satire of the patriarchal culture, Loyelow is a genre bending novel, an epic of today’s cosmopolite cities, a plot in prose.

Relation of the novel to the artist’s practice

Deniz Gul’s practice comprises how language performs as text, sculpture and space, in exhibitions that feature installations, objects and books that speak of structure, composition, form and consequence. Loyelow follows an initiative by the artist in 2011 with her text '5 Person Buffet,' which led to three artistic realizations and a performance, and her second solo show B.I.M.A.B.K.R. Gul’s books corroborates her sculptural work; they serve also as conceptual backdrop to her quest for language. Deniz Gul constitutes her work within the threshold of the conscious and the unconscious, the substantial and the poetic. Translation and re-writing in the form of sculpting (as a method) is an important aspect of her work. Playing with words' conceptual image plasticity, Gul studies syntax and poesy to outbound. Text is a material for her. Words seek to liberate themselves from meaning. They become sculpture-like. Moreover, they become sculptures. And yet neither the sculpture or the novel is obliged or dependent to one another. Collective memory, archaic schemes, locality, mediocracy, daily rituals or historical evidence are referential in Gul’s work. The reader and the viewer is invited to a sensorial experience that is not only packed with the intellect. Centers and peripheries, history and memory, life and death, language and archetypes, rituals and metaphors, such are the relations Gul dissects meticulously in her way of using these materials.

Novel's website

Novel's website 2