Art On Istanbul welcomes its visitors to the Piyalepaşa space between 13 December and 10 January with Eli Bensusan’s solo exhibition The Notes of a Raindrop.
Eli Bensusan transforms science textbooks written in the first half of 1900s, by deconstruting and reconstructing them into a mythological story, narrating the journey of a raindrop. He rearranges texts extracted from their original context as if creating a new book that follows an entirely different narrative pattern. Through assemblage-sculpture works incorporating found objects produced in the same era, he opens his fictional world to the viewer. This pile of words, images, and objects—rescued years later from dusty shelves-sometimes evokes a poetic, sometimes critical, and at times a satirical tone. The works are accompanied by a sound narration composed by musician Arad Musosoğlu, with production contributions from musician Yusuf Hacıalioğlu. Offering visitors a further enhanced layer of experience, the sound piece presents a new interpretation of the same story, created by the musicians.
In her accompanying text for the exhibition, Ecem Arslanay elaborates on the qualities of the fluid water droplet chosen as the storyteller: The narrator is no longer a bearer of “absolute knowledge.” In fact, the narrators subjectness is fluid as much as the knowledge. Who is the narrator? An anarchic laborer who weaves a counter-archive from within the archive? A playful child turning scraps into compost? Eli’s gestures of re-editing, classifying, partial censoring, and trimming transform a single-voiced dictate into a choir. And as the choir multiplies the voice, it also dissolves boundaries. It is precisely here that the illusion of positivist completion disperses; attention shifts not to the closure of a correct answer but to the poetics of questions that open together. Is it symbiotic? What if we imagine a meteorontological* polyphony expanding through human–animal–machine–microbial bonds, the circulation of water, the flight of dust, the fluctuations of elemental cycles? It speaks local, mobile, intuitive; it does not lean on the measuring, white, inferential, patriarchal center. The word “queer,” often used by Parker [Bertha Morris Parker, writer of the resource books], also shifts within this polyphony: from its 1940s meaning of “uncanny, unsettled” to today’s mode of multiplicity capable of forming alliances and bending boundaries—inviting us to listen to the beauty of the rainbow.
In his notes, Eli Bensusan likens the drop—who acts as the storyteller—to a combination of three archetypes mentioned by Walter Benjamin in The Arcades Project. “It wanders and observes like a flâneur—under the sea, on land, among ruins, in the clouds. At the same time, it is a ragpicker (chiffonier), gathering what is deemed waste, saving their stories, promising them new lives. It uses the mechanisms of old measuring devices, removes numerical dials, and exhibits an intuitive effort to understand the forces of nature. Finally, it is a storyteller. In bringing its story together from fragments—through its notes (in both meanings)—the attitude, tone, and intent it constructs carry a meaning beyond words. The fragments it points to reveal the destruction that separated them from their wholes.”
The Notes of a Raindrop tells, through its notes, the story of a drop in constant motion: its fall into the world like a newborn human, its discovery of the diversity of the ocean and the universe, the traces it leaves on land as if writing letters across valleys, its passage through cities that emerged with the birth of civilization, the destructions it witnesses, and the end it reaches in its search for personal purpose. Viewed this way, the works can be seen as a travelogue of a wandering droplet; from another perspective, they can also be read as notes. Clustered like chords, forming various harmonies and melodies, they come together into a symphony-inviting the viewer to narrativize, to “symphonize” life.
Accompanying text: Ecem Arslanay
Notes: Eli Bensusan
Sound narration:
Composition: Arad Musosoğlu
Music: Arad Musosoğlu & Yusuf Hacıalioğlu