Virtual Bodies

My exhibition called “Virtual Bodies” aimed to question the place of “the body” and the individuals in consumer society. The body has been replaced the soul in today’s consumer society. And the body is surrounded by the myths of health, diet, therapy and desire. We are constantly invited to re-discover the bodies by Mass media which converted them into an investment object. For example; the temperature of a model in a woman’s magazine is the same as a modern furniture. This is an “ambiance” temperature.New sexuality is hot and cold just like the hot and cold colors game in “functional” housing. The erotism is not in the desire but in its indicators.Sexuality is no longer just in sexuality, but also in many other places; media, cinema, literature. Likewise the politics is not only in politics but has spread to all areas. To religion, art, philosophy and to science.Today, football is a little politics, art is a little magazine and the magazine is a little art.The fact is intertwined with the copies and the reality, with the appearance. Day by day, our lives started to go into a simulation. Society is composed of largely similar individuals who speak, think and wear as in the world of television so that the type of individuals trying to find a sense for the existence has largely disappeared. As we can call it “the Transparency Era”, this is an age where we can’t help but mix everything to everything. Everything could be everything and everyone can say or do everything.

​

Politics are determined by public research; ads by testing; songs played on the radio by consumer panels, the end of the movies and posters by polls and television programs are determined by ratings. My work is an attempt to reveal this inversion and the transsexual structure of the system. It is based on the despair and the disintegration of individuals subject to continuous sexual, political and religious manipulation. Feel-good states coming from serum, controlled anesthesia, cloned expressions and lives. Models on the state of sleep-swim are just carrying the happiness scattered around as a mask on their face. The models exhibited are transformed into virtual bodies and artificial androgenic identities which no longer has any side to be desired. Cloned bodies and the heads found a body in other individuals. This irony is an artistic criticism of how we are transformed into similar copies in a cultural and mental state of cloning.

​

Ali Alışır – 2009

​