Intricate glass sparrows
serve as an apt metaphor for millions of refugees who can’t go home.
Lisa Morrow
Three sparrows by Felekşan
Onar and Berlin Art Glas Studio glassblowers Jesse Günther und Sadhbh Mowlds
(2017, photo by Kerem Sanlıman, all images courtesy Staatliche Museen zu Berlin
and Museum für Islamische Kunst)
In January, a flock of
delicate glass swallows settled in the Aleppo Room at the Pergamon Museum in
Berlin, Germany. Since then, they have sat on the floor, shimmering and
seemingly poised for takeoff, as though preparing to fly home. Light reflects
off and refracts through the birds, making them seem to move; their earthy hues
echo colorful details on the wooden doors and walls, which form a
courtyard-like cage.
27 birds make up Perched,
an exhibition created by the Turkish glass artist Felekşan Onar. Though
beautiful, their small forms are static, perhaps trapped in the knowledge that
home is out of reach. In the Aleppo Room — which takes its name from the
once-thriving Syrian city that civil war has reduced to rubble — they serve as
a metaphor for the millions of refugees who can’t return to Syria.
Each bird looks delicate,
even insubstantial. You want nothing more than to pick them up, to stroke them
and protect them — yet at the same time they’re tough and strong. Onar has
harnessed the contradictory nature of glass: the birds are whole, yet prone to
shattering into tiny pieces of nothing. The walls around them, elegantly
hand-painted in the 17th century, come from a Syrian residence of an Armenian
merchant from the Ottoman period; they’re reminiscent of a time when the city
was prosperous, its residents free to come and go.
Just as war can change a
person’s life in an instant, the actual blowing of the glass takes only a
moment. But the process takes a long time to get right. After a successful
career in industrial textile design, Onar took a week of introductory lessons
in glass design. Then she ordered a kiln, installed it in her garage, and
within a few months, was working solo. She has taken classes at the Glass
Furnace in Istanbul, but mostly she learned through trial and error. Five years
teaching herself showed her that glass behaves in unpredictable ways.
Onar kept meticulous
records of each step of her process. Producing glass art, to use her own words,
is “almost like cooking — you cook something, and have to add more or less of
something.” She starts with a quick sketch before she begins, which allows her
to compare the final product to her initial vision.
Manipulating and shaping
glass requires high heat and intense physical labor. In Istanbul, she has long
worked with her own team, but for Perched, she worked in Germany with Berlin
Glas. Once Onar had a design she was happy with, she made a model in clay, then
created plaster blowing molds from the original clay model. Each mold can only
be used a few times. This means that although each bird draws on the same
design, they vary in color, texture, and translucency, giving each a tangible
individuality.
The idea for Perched was
also a long time in the making. Onar grew up in Söke, in the Aydın Province of
Turkey. Like many towns situated on the Aegean, Söke was home to a mix of
Turkish-born Greeks called Rum, who lived alongside Turks until an official
relocation agreement, based on religious identity, was signed in 1923. More
than a million people were displaced. Onar’s childhood housekeeper, a woman
called Nazmiye, was born in Crete and was forced to move to Turkey as part of
the exchange. The artist remembers hearing stories about the island in
Greek-accented Turkish. A recent reading of Louis de Bernieres’ novel Birds
Without Wings brought memories of Nazmiye back to Onar, in vivid detail.
Onar now considers Istanbul
her spiritual and physical home, the place where she feels most able to express
her creativity — but the city is undergoing enormous change. In the last few
years, signs in Arabic have covered over the shabby chic European-style
buildings of Beyoğlu, where her studio is located. Onar said that the “old
buildings tell me that what I do today isn’t important, life continues and
everything will go on, whether I’m part of it or not. These places make me
think about a larger range of history.” Today, history is happening in
Istanbul. Of the millions of displaced Syrians who have fled their war-torn
homeland for Turkey, more than half a million have found a precarious perch in
the metropolis, trying to find a new place to nest.
The events of the present
mirror the mass migration that shaped Onar’s past. Then as now, seeking safety,
limited by language, lacking money and connections, people on the move have
become, in Onar’s words, “birds, not without wings, but perched, grounded.”
Perched is a visceral expression of the fact that in spite of differences of
religion, culture, and individual histories, what we all want most is to be in
the place we call home.
https://hyperallergic.com/429375/glass-birds-perched-in-a-berlin-museum-as-a-metaphor-for-migration/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feb%2028%202018%20Daily%20-%20The%20Hushed%20Brilliance%20of%20James%20Castles%20Mysterious%20Drawings&utm_content=Feb%2028%202018%20Daily%20-%20The%20Hushed%20Brilliance%20of%20James%20Castles%20Mysterious%20Drawings+CID_d1d1f61d3da9271c1c393db2dff4c132&utm_source=HyperallergicNewsletter
