The Letters of Shadow Puppets (Video Still), 2012,
Video 0’55” Loop
The Letters of Shadow Puppets is a video capturing a site-specific installation of twisting Venetian blinds, with the text of a conversation between two characters (Hacivat and Karagöz) stuck on each side of the slats. It is, therefore, a representation of the experience of communication. The conversation belongs to the traditional Karagöz shadow puppetry performance (widespread around 16th century Ottoman period), which involves two-dimensional figures casting their shadows on a screen. It takes place between shadow puppet figures Karagöz and Hacivat, who are well-known for their misunderstandings of each other due to their divergent cultural backgrounds, tongue twisters, and wordplays.
The video work The Letters of Shadow Puppets stem from my interest in the failure of transcultural, transpolitical and transpersonal communication. What makes communication fail are the interpretative lenses (i.e. cultural and personal referents, mediums, language barriers, etc.) through which we access the world. We are not merely passively recording our environment and events; we are continuously creating meaning. Our perceptions are distorted due to our own will as well as external factors.
Hence, a conversation resembles two people speaking to each other through a window, sitting in different spaces, speaking and listening from different world views. Accordingly, every turn of the blinds and every communicative stage is a filter and there are obvious losses during this travel of content. This work addresses the distance between the communicators, the (often faulty) mechanisms whereby we receive information, and the importance of context in communicative processes. Thus, through this work, I question the elements that contribute to – and impede upon – the transmission of information from the source to the receiver that shape and reform the content of the information.
“The following is not exactly a dialogue, although in places it resembles an exchange that might actually have taken place between two interlocutors. Yet, one will notice as well a certain inconstancy in this resemblance. It is perhaps a typographical rather than a dialogic form that has imposed itself here, the back and forth of more than one “voice” requiring the convention of blank intervals across the page. These, in turn, could be thought of as the slats of a venetian blind, or a jalousie, which partially obstructs the view.” Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds
Miscommunication: transmission of information through The Letters of Shadow Puppets (2022), Original Article Published in Text and Performance Quarterly (AHCI) by Routledge. https://doi.org/10.1080/10462937.2022.2116096