Elif Eda

The Thing Between Us

Performing a headscarf removal, the artist demonstrates how covering one’s head or removing something from one’s head would not attract attention in another context, but that in Turkey, over a certain period of time, these simple acts were problematized with every person we saw in our daily lives.

The piece is composed of a 360-degree video and virtual reality, rather than two-dimensional video, in an effort to show the present-day sociopolitical heritage of an act which was problematized at a specific time in history. What could be considered a neutral act in space, here and now where everyone stops and looks at it, is reproduced as a discourse element with the gaze of the participant.

The meaning produced with the gaze of someone else could be entirely different from the story intended by the performer of the act. Hence the person in charge is not the doer of the act but the gazer, which in turn strips the doer of their individuality, turning them into a concept or even a “thing.”

In this short video, “The Thing Between Us” manifests in an unusual way how a possibility of communication between individuals is rendered impossible.