MERİÇ HIZAL: TIME TO PUT OUR THINKING “HATS” ON

 For many years Meriç Hızal has been an artist who starts off with forms in nature and transforms them. In search of the dialect between natural forms and perceived forms, Hızal got absorbed into forms that complete one another, transform to each other within dialectic concept. In other words, she brought her idea in mind into a form with a plain shape; she transformed this idea into form. For example, taking the sun, a uniting element as a starting point, she used sun clocks to represent time. Because, Hızal thinks the Sun is the common denominator of each and every one of us. As we are all illuminated and heated by the very same sun, The Sun also reminds us that all people live under the same roof, or Meriç Hızal’s “Sun clocks” do so.

 I already mentioned Meriç Hızal transforming forms in nature. As we all know, one of the primary forms existing in nature is the form of the ‘human’. Though human forms are not visible in Meriç Hızal’s artworks, it is inevitable to feel the ‘human’ within. Remembering that the process of transforming nature refers to ‘culture’, we must add that Meriç Hızal makes the human and human culture exist in this nature during her transforming nature into form and still making it visible despite of its complete invisibility.  Just like the “hats” in this exhibition...

 With her “Hats”, Meriç Hızal constructs a relation between personal memory and social-cultural-political memory. Perhaps in a way, Meriç Hızal’s starting point is comprehending today’s culture as successive culture of the past, extensive effort to remember an ancient culture and our standing at the end of something, which effects us in a much more personal and real level, as Jan Assmann points out in his book titled “Cultural Memory: Script, Recollection, and Political Identity in Early Civilizations”. Is it possible for our memory to carry on traces of past whilst constructing “today” and “now”; Could today’s art represent itself by remembering and reminding; these questions rise up with the “Hats” of Meriç Hızal.  

Meriç Hızal is an artist who utilises both past and present of the geography she lives in. In the ‘Hats’ exhibition, the past expresses itself by attributions to both Hızal’s personal history and the history of society. Meriç Hızal, quoting her own words, objectifies what is in her memory by carving all into the stone just as the ancient civilisations of this geography had once done. Thus the audience encounters the conflict between Hızal’s own subjective history and social history. Meriç Hızal thinks about the “hat” becoming a symbol in the society whereas it has been basically a part of our daily life, and then this symbol lets her make a turn to her subjective life. When we talk about her exhibitions, 1973 “Deconstruction-Construction Faculty of Fine Arts Finish-Start”, we enter Meriç Hızal’s private life; and then the exhibitions of 2000 “I am silent, You are silent, He/she is silent, We are silent, You are silent, They are silent” or 2007 “I am guilty, You are guilty, He/she is guilty, We are guilty, You are guilty, They are guilty” let us be the witness to her privacy encountering the social. Whereas, the conflict between Meriç Hızal’s personal memory and social-cultural-political memory, takes us back to ‘the idea of the pieces that make the whole’ that she adopted throughout all her artistic life. It is such that, she invites all people illuminated and heated by the very same Sun, to think under the same “hat” or invites them to the same dining table as in her artwork titled “Anatolian Dinner Table”: to put our thinking hats on…  

“I sing to myself, yet when I exhibit my works I feel I sing to others” Meriç Hızal said in 1990. The song she sings with the “Hats” might be sadder from now on, perhaps it is a requiem and “Hats” focuses on the question “What Should We Do?” in unity.

 It is exactly the time to put our thinking hats on...

Burcu Pelvanoğlu