Everyone and no one

Where no one can tell what is white and what is black, the light goes out, freedom becomes a voluntary captivity.
Albert Camus - The Rebel Man

Özgür Demirci produced the video work "Everybody and Nobody" at the end of 2020, as part of the group exhibition "Justice, Property, Fundamentals", which was exhibited online due to the pandemic at Corridor Project Space, established in Amsterdam. Similar to the negative effects of many professional groups due to the pandemic, the production practice of artists has also been hit. In this context, a video series emerged in which artists question justice. "Everyone and Nobody" produced by Demirci presents a selection of the rights and freedoms enshrined in the Constitution of the Republic of Turkey.

The tablet on which this selection is written, melts with the liquid surface it comes into contact with, becomes illegible and gradually disappears. The thread-like existence of right and justice determines the focus of this study. The insecurity caused by the suspension of freedoms protected by laws and rights, which are inviolable elements, by various means, constitutes the building block of destruction. The dictionary explanation of the state of dissolution that substances reach by reacting with another substance is as follows; “The state of solid, liquid and gaseous substances dispersing in a solvent to form a single phase, overcoming the attractive forces that hold their molecules or atoms together”. (Yakıncı, 2014: 10) In Demirci's work, the rights and freedoms included in the constitution are disintegrated into parts by being representatively dissolved in injustice. The next stage of rapidly dissolving matter is the precipitation process. The matter, which does not disappear despite being disintegrated, begins to collapse towards the bottom. Where the gravitational force that holds the pieces together disappears, loneliness begins. In Demirci's work, the remainder of the Styrofoam tablets are the letters that oscillate dispersedly on the liquid surface and sink to the bottom, and the material in which the words were written, which a while ago formed meaningful wholes by the letters coming together.