Turkish artist Köken Ergun’s video installation Wedding, explores cultural memory. For eight months the artist photographed more than forty wedding ceremonies of Turkish immigrants in Berlin, documentary footage which he edited repeatedly. The work presents the documentary information as a cultural mirror reflecting the displacement of cultural customs. Frame by frame, from the visit to the bridal salon, the artist creates a fictive documentation of a ”typically Turkish” wedding, as it were. In this way, not only does he deconstruct and decode the cultural characteristics of the Turkish community, but he also reconstructs the way in which identity is manifested through changing ritualistic codes. Ergun avoids the ethnographic (colonialist) obstacle which results from romanticizing the ”object of research,” thus creating, with calculated craftiness, an imaginary narrative elusive to foreign eyes, introducing collective cultural memory to be reconsidered.
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