Born in 1976 in Diyarbakır, Işık studied Painting at Dicle University. He mostly worked with video since the late 1990s. He was introduced to conceptual art prior to his university education, which has become the main axis of his practice. The video works by the artist, who adopts a critical and ironic language on migration, culture, social problems, and social identities, have a utopian vision and a performative quality. In his videos predicating on dark humor, Işık questions the impact of popular culture on collective memory. Covering his subject matter with great care and attention, the artist takes a critical look at contemporary society and underlines the delicate situation experienced by minorities in Turkey. In addition to his videos, his works in various media are viewed as the expression of the social memory layers intertwined with the artist's identity and personal memory. Işık continues to live and work in Diyarbakır.
Işık's artist video can be accessed from the link below.
SAHA Studio - Berat Işık: Karanlıkta Dans: Zuhur & Kelebek Etkisi: Star
Dancer in the Dark: Appearance
The first of two projects conceived at SAHA Studio is derived from the video work Dancer in the Dark, produced in 2003 as an outcry on behalf of all others, in reference to the human rights violations that took place in Turkey in the nineties, especially in Southeast Anatolia, which were not covered in the press or other media outlets despite being resurfaced, or their heavily distorted content in daily news. Taped in front of a camera that strictly records sound with its lens covered, this early video consists of a voice announcing to the audience in his native Kurdish language that he stands right in front of them in an increasingly tense tone, which represents the other, the minority, the ostracized and the invisible. The camera thus functions akin to a tool that allows seeing rays like the infrared or gamma rays that the naked human eye cannot normally perceive.
As this early work recently sought another form to take on, the new project called Dance in the Dark: Appearance attempts to "bend" this two-minute moving image that consists of a total of 3000 frames and 13 subtitles. Starting with “Hey! Do not you see me?" and ending with “I am here!” these 13 frames turn into 30-centimeter basalt cubes. Inspired by the civilizations established in and around of Diyarbakır for centuries, the nations living on these lands, the edifices like Sur (city walls) they had built with basalt stone obtained from the lava that cooled after the last eruption of Karacadağ two million years ago, and ultimately, the transformation of this burning material into massive rocks, the work has the intention of muffling, transforming, and sculpting the video.
Butterfly Effect: Star
Produced for the exhibition Envy Enmity Embarrassment (2013) with the support of Arter, Butterfly Effect is the second work that provides a ground for contemplating the states of video, which was eventually transformed with the intention of “bending” a preexisting work during the residency at SAHA Studio.
The derivational work was conceived in reference to people who take on performative roles in contemporary art videos, and who appear to be mainly anonymous as merely the artist’s means of expression, unlike actors in movies. The portraits of these people belonging to different age groups and genders from the earlier video work are drawn by artist Alican Leblebici, who was invited to collaborate with the artist on this project. The portraits are then superposed on the cover of cinema magazines that came out on the year these people were born in, to elevate them to the status of movie stars. Attempting to prevent the anonymization of the figures in the video and the disappearance of the magazines, which also take a lot of effort to prepare and publish, the work titled The Butterfly Effect: Star tries to create a kind of refraction of time by combining the birth of the magazines and the actors, hence creating a brand-new birth, a single body. Extending the cinematographic reference from the magazine's content to the titles of the videos, the work accentuates the actions of figures -holding their breath and puffing their cheeks, letting their breaths go with all their strength at the point where they are exhausted- as the cover stories of the magazines. Their breath as a determinant for life and death, as well as the "butterfly effect" created by these encounters aim to open new channels of thought on human strength, weakness, and existence.
