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Virtuosity of Objects – Beral Madra

At first glance, Şakir Gökçabağ’s wall and floor installations captivate the viewer’s joyful perception with their familiar object content and geometric and aesthetic ornamentation. However, when it comes to the materials and discursive meaning of the works, the viewer encounters a concept, content, and aesthetic knowledge that alludes to successive movements in 20th-century art history as well as to the reality of consumption system. When the viewer is ready to understand the parameters of this knowledge and memory, they can arrive at the truth of how these works can visually depict the complex relationships between today’s neo-capitalist economy and culture. Gökçebağ has presented a very affluent series of works in terms of depicting this complexity through visual imagery, from the early 2000s to the present day.

The artworks displayed in their exhibition spaces, arranged with playful cuttings, simple, ornate, and individual narratives, are not actually that innocent. As always, when one delves into the structure behind the visual appearance of the artwork, a path opens up towards important intellectual avenues, such as references to 20th-century Dada and Fluxus movements, and the meaning of the consumer economy in human life today.

In fact, the detailed entity of the work consists of objects, things, materials, commodities used, consumed, possessed or preserved by humans in their daily life. It actually displays how humans relate to material objects as a fundamental aspect of Globalism and Neo-Capitalism. Baudrillard in his book The System of Objects deals in depth about objects. For the human and object relationship he points out that the object has not taken on human traits, but has taken on technical, objective and economic traits. He says: “Man has become less rational than his own objects, which now run ahead of him, so to speak, organizing his surroundings, and thus appropriating his actions”. (1) From this point of view Gökçebağ’s aim is to review the capacious discourses on commodity fetishism, animism, epistemology, magic, materiality, technology, or consumption; and moreover, one can suppose that from these various topics he suggests new ways of illuminating some cultural dimensions of Globalism, Neo-capitalism and Post-truth by juxtaposing these commodity character of the objects within the guidelines of ornamentation and beautification.

His 2005 art work titled FOUNTAIN ALLA TURCA, which shows an İslamic toilette is proof of how and why the artist began producing his art. Marcel Duchamp’s  Pissoir , which marked the beginning of the Relational Aesthetics movement of the 2000s, has been the subject of countless works to date. Gökçebağ approaches this reality with a post-colonialist approach and indicates that there are other cultures which have their own established objects. Gökçebağ with his sharp approach brings this century old relationship of life and art to the forefront is another courageous move. He is focusing on the finest details of things and objects in the life of humans. All these objects guide the viewer to  Ranciere’s determination “the incorporation of the ‘low’ into aesthetic production had occurred already in the 19th century, when the aesthetic regime had dismantled the correlation between the dignity of a subject matter and its mode of representation that had been in place before.” “The subject matter of Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) is not the dignified, beautiful form, but the gesture of showing a banal object as art.”(2)

For Gökçebağ this shift became visible in all objects he is collecting and designing aesthetical forms. To his conviction the viewer dares to ask whether there are art works immune to the requisites of ready-made? Should it be considered the hegemony of ready-made as in fact the minimal codes of Neo-capitalist consumption, can engage the critical thinking on art productions for hundred years? In this sense these objects with their high value in the global market can be liberated of their identity as consumption good and gain their real value of being essential in human life.  Once again Ready-made is registered as inevitable representation.

Today, artistic memory is a fundamental source of inspiration for today’s art productions and movement; how this source is used demonstrates the artist’s powerful and unique vision. Dada and Fluxus represented the first blurring of the lines between art and life; artists created their works in the midst of society, tracing the path of daily life. In Gökçebağ’s work this characteristic clearly connects Dada and Fluxus with contemporary Relational Aesthetics.

Beral Madra, February 2026

1.https://theoryphilosophy1631584.wordpress.com/2018/01/23/jean-baudrillards-the-system-of-objects/

2. https://www.frieze.com/article/do-philosophers-understand-contemporary-art