Hakan Sorar

Visual stories about human, body, flesh, identity, skin, hairs, wound, flaw, limbs, gender, intimacy, aesthetic, society, politics, hiding, embarrassment, escape, touch, acquainting, thinking and reconciliation… Hakan Sorar

Thought, Image, Body

In Rome in the first century A.D., Pliny the Elder was angry with collectors filling their galleries with statues they didn’t even know who they depicted. These statues were only there because they were art. Pliny the Elder, a valuable scientist, always restricts a portrait or an image to certain representations because of his conservative thoughts. According to him, a representation must absolutely contain a legitimate person or God. Although this approach from centuries ago still remains, we need to regulate our visual ethics. While the world is full of representations, we are in risk of turning into the things we rebel against. When we look for traces of loss and uncertainty, we risk fixating our finds. If there is nothing else within our action field than our body, then how are we going to deal with all this confusion? Since we cannot be driven by the perspective of Pliny the Elder from ancient Rome, it is important for us to assess the uniqueness of images. Actually, all of this introduction might be relevant to Hakan Sorar’s work. The artist focuses on different human bodies in his photographies and the digital field he works in. In their productions, the hairs on the skin’s surface, hands and arms appear in eccentric ways. Spinoza comes to mind at the first opportunity. The philosopher’s phrase “nobody has determined yet what the body is capable of” emphasizes our subjectivity. Our motion field bears the speciality of singularity. However, the social field has some prohibitions, obstacles and strict practices. Nevertheless, our unfortunate situation has been constantly filled with politics. And that is how Hakan Sorar’s visual arrangement not only expresses such a line of tension, but also tries to reveal the bodies’authenticity. Hence, we can examine the artist’s work with three different approaches. First, we can try analyzing them by the images’layouts. Both, the black and white pictures and the digital body representations or parts of them grow in Sorar’s world with an esthetic reflex. Instead of limiting themselves to fixed visuals, the artist uses a democratic perspective and goes beyond uniform bodies. Coming to our second approach, the theme of time emerges in the visuals. Hakan Sorar creates their own time in their visual contrivances. In other words, they surpass the divided, linear, limited by generations, superficial perception of time to emphasize the cyclical track. In the digitally prepared exhibits, virtual time is fictionalized. In the photographs, while confronted with different body markings with every glance, the emphasis is on the present. Lastly, arriving at the third approach, we see that the visuals are anonymous. This situation, while breaking the representation of the exhibits, enables the bodies that cannot express themselves, remain in limbo, and become indeterminate. With these three approaches, we wouldn’t be mistaken to say we suppose that Sorar’s visuals are thinking. Thus, we see that the processed hybrid bodies do not get stuck in a single, less than identity point. Visual forms that assume the title “thoughtful” set their eyes on bodies that lose their light. In other words, Hakan Sorar’s exhibits invite us all to question ourselves by not giving up thinking easily.

İlker Cihan Biner