‘Resisting Hospitality’:
On behalf of community:
The intention with the Turkish tea glass lamp is site specific to Dalston Lane, that has a big community of Turkish citizens. But due to the re-generation of the area, cleaning up and evening out the asphalt to welcome new citizens who pay higher rents, due to the huge interest in the new and cooler Dalston/London Fields area. I wanted to give attention to this, in my opinion gentrification. By letting the Turks see themselves in the window display of a newly ‘mushroomed’ gallery in this area.
The people in this area are looking back at us, gallery owners, artists, EU-citizens, café owners who all try to make money out of this area. The funny but also sad thing being that it is the same people knowing the cultural theory behind gentrification, so they are aware that they are doing this. That we are all taking part in the process of ‘killing Dalston’.
I wanted the old Turkish and Kurdish uncles of this area to be able to see themselves one last time, pay them a certain respect for living (read: surviving) in Dalston when it was all dirty, dark and criminal. I wanted to thank them for making it ready for us “money makers” and wanna-be artists.
I wanted them to stop in front of my lamp and see their culture as a part of this area although things are not changing but ahs already changed!
If one dark mustached uncle stops in front of this gallery and wonders and feels like going into a gallery that is soooo different from his world that means that I have done a difference to this area although tiny and ephemeral.
Im sad that areas like Dalston only have a certain time of living and a best before date is long gone..
The work is both an act of using an exoticized everyday object, that anyone can obtain in inner Copenhagen, in North East London or in any other metropol today, in a new way to emancipate it from its exoticized post-colonial position. And give it a new form to save it from being exoticized.
On behalf of girls/women: I always wanted to give a traditional everyday object a new form, literally turning its purpose upside down. Middleastern cultures are known for their hospitality, bringing tea as the first thing whenever someone visits them. I do not want to be hospitable anymore! It feels naïve after having been colonized.
Physically drilling the tea glasses is a picture on the defloration of virginity of Turkish girls to emancipate them from present servicing which are obscured performative acts leading to future marriages. The drillings give rise to an impossible tea serving. The tea cannot be served. The act/the tradition is thus killed.