“Namahrem”

Pre-interactive installation / İstanbul, 2011

For DESTRUCTION 2011 Tayfun Serttas has produced a site-specific installation, NAMAHREM. Using the physical sections of the space, the viewers can interact with the work and connect to the sexually charged chat rooms of MIRC. The space where the exhibition takes place used to be a brothel and the address, “Akarsu St, No: 2” that is used as a nickname in the chat rooms enables the viewers to connect to any MIRC user in Turkey. In this very “free” space, it is imminent for the viewer to meet a zoophil from Kayseri, a necrophil from Adana, a sock-sniffer from Trabzon and a pedophil from Konya. According to the artist, culturally repressed sexual identities can become a phantasm in the liberated, “anonymous” environment of the Internet. MIRC, the predecessor to all chat programs, a most rudimentary software, enables different levels of sexual perceptions from all over Turkey to come together; it becomes a most revealing database for researchers working in history, religion, sociology and ethics.

The artist wrote the poem “The Missing Moral Seed” in 1923. He greets the phenomenon of the Internet, MIRC, which he defines as an allegory for a sexual revolution, and the acceptance of MIRC into the quotidian:

The Missing Moral Seed

The Man first learned the mahrem
He was inside.
And then the namahrem.
He was outside.
And then the savior created MIRC.
The inside and the outside became one.
It, inside is outside,
It, was the glorified gate between the mahrem and the namahrem.
It, was blessedly mysterious.
Privacy gave power to the Man.
Privacy liberated the Man.
Privacy gave the Man a secondary identity.
Privacy gave lust to the Man.
Privacy gave vengeance to the Man.
Privacy gave gate to the Man.
Privacy gave itself to the Man
Thus, the mahrem became the namahrem.
The ones that wrote their souls to the namahrem wrote the reality of meaning.

*Mahrem is a word in Turkish, appropriated from Arabic, meaning hidden. “Na” denotes negation. Namahrem thus means not hidden, open, public. Mahrem is what is inside, namahrem is what is outside.