SENA BAŞÖZ
SYSTEMS OF SUPPORT:
Agents and Tools of Caring
2009-2017
The investigation into friction and wounding, which spanned from 2006 to 2011, culminated in a new project focused on discovering tools for care and healing.
In 2009, Sena Başöz embarked on a series of street performances centered around a nurse who struggled with a sense of purpose. For two weeks, she donned the disguise of an 80s-era nurse—an embodiment of both personal admiration and a significant part of her own history. Through this performance, she explored how society’s idealization of women as caregivers and their association with selflessness often positions nursing as an archetypal gender role.
As she explored the tools and methods of healing, she came to realize that bandages function as collages applied to wounds. This insight led to her video work Doctoring, which consists of a series of altered photographs, reflecting this process of mending and masking.
Her Artist Book, Working through the Beginning Sequence, takes a similar approach by blocking or censoring images from the Gezi Park events with black patches.
Her nurse alter ego reappears in the 2016 video Be the Doctor, Practice Nursing. In this work, the nurse comes to the realization that while a wound may need to be dressed, it also has the capacity to heal on its own over time.
Doctoring
2010
12’ video
Working Through the Beginning Sequence
2014
Artist book
Be the Doctor, Practice Nursing
2016
6’24” video
Commissioned by SPOT production fund for Produce 3
Be the Doctor, Practice Nursing is divided into three parts: In Part One, the nurse isolates herself from the world around her. Part Two explores themes of depression and desire, proposing a moment of activation for what has been frozen or repressed. Part Three focuses on reunion, where the nurse acknowledges that while a wound may need dressing, it has the ability to heal on its own with time. A nurse who seeks to transform the world understands this deeply.
The Screen
2016
3’ video on vintage medical screen
Commissioned by SPOT production fund for Produce 3
The playful video of floating white bones on the sea was shot in Çeşme, on a shore near the Greek island of Chios. The images in the video are cutouts from the Sobotta Atlas of Human Anatomy, first published in 1904 and still in use today. This atlas maps the layers of the human body, and the cutouts float between borders, dissolving into the life-giving waters—representing an ultimate unification. How can we truly grasp the meaning of human life and its tragedies when viewed from the perspective of the Earth and its own time?
Naming is Death
2016
lecture performance with Yasemin Özcan
Commisioned by SPOT production fund for Produce 3
Is it possible to recover through art? Is the creative process inherently a form of healing? Drawing from their own personal histories, Sena Başöz and Yasemin Özcan bring the concept of healing from the theoretical realm into the tangible space of the sickbed in this lecture performance. This work invites an exploration of the space between the empirical sciences and the accumulation of esoteric knowledge. With subtle nods to Jung and Beuys, a poem begins to unfold.
Date :April 25, 2016
Place: Koç Pera
Notes on a Parallel Life
2017
5’50’’ Performance video
Realized as part of Experiementierfeld Tokyo Project with the production grant of SAHA foundation.
Notes on a Parallel Life is a performance by Sena Başöz, embodied through her alter ego, "the nurse." In this work, the nurse attempts to adapt to the city of Tokyo while simultaneously seeking to alter it using a tool she constructs herself.
Sweetheart
2017
Site-Specific Sound Loop
In her sound installation Sweetheart, Sena Başöz reads terms of endearment directed toward an unknown subject with deep expressiveness. This recording is then placed at the base of a pittosporum shrub in the garden of the exhibition space. In this way, the shrub, nestled in a secluded corner, begins to "speak," much like the reeds that cannot keep a secret, whispering: “King Midas has donkey ears.”
Freed from the constraints of the holy mother or the desires of a woman, these terms of endearment are released into the public space.