Hale Tenger, 1960

Hale Tenger was born in 1960 to an immigrant family in Izmir. After graduating from Mimar Sinan University’s Department of Ceramics, she went to the UK on scholarship and continued postgraduate studies at the South Glamorgan Institute of Higher Education. The artist currently lives and works in Istanbul.

In her works, Hale Tenger deals with the ravages and difficulties caused on a global scale by civilization, progress and modernization. She explores issues such as migration, frontiers and discrimination as related to the concepts of identity, culture and belonging. Her videos and her installations, in which she uses unusual materials, draw on references from political history and human psychology. She thus calls into question the individual’s existential conditions in the face of power and the paradoxical situations in which humanity finds itself despite all the pompous discourses on civilization and modernization. Foremost among these situations are indirect or direct violence and hegemony. Hale Tenger avoids the role of representative, documentarist or simple spokesperson of her own geography. Her works are extremely subtle and sensitive and open to universal readings.

“Beirut” shows the windows of the hotel in front of which Rafik Hariri was assassinated by a car bomb in 2005. The video was shot secretly in an area that is under the armed protection of the United Nations. In fact, the bomb crater still existed on the other facade of the building when the video was being shot. The peacefully fluttering white curtains of the empty hotel, with the sounds of explosions and sirens heard in the background, leave us with a sudden confrontation with war. As if highlighting the postwar regret, oblivion, and the desperate repetition of war, the video is played in a loop, creating a vicious circle. While the music for the video was composed by Serdar Ateşer, the sounds of war at the end of the video were recorded in 2007 during Israel’s intervention in Lebanon and taken from YouTube (user: msoubra).