“Abstract Allegory”

Mixed media / Paris, 2010

Allegory, as a visual and literary method is based on the representation of situations, people and objects in different forms through fiction. The main difference between this fiction and other fictions is that it refers to itself in the most indirect way by creating coherence outside the story which it tackles. And in situations where it is impossible for the narration to be direct, allegory steps in as a necessary mechanism rather than an artistic choice. This type of allegory is now more about daily life. In culture this is called innuendo and unlike irony it creates a kind of habit in areas where the freedom of expression of one’s own experience does not exist.

I cannot recall the first time I learned about allegory not as a notion but as fiction. I guess it has existed all my life. And recently I have realized that this mechanism was protecting me from a kind of risk. Of course it was different than Kafka’s definition of allegory, Walter Benjamin’s modern allegory and the cinematographic allegory that Fight Club’s criticism of consumerist society. As a method of survival, allegory was going to turn into the basis of introspective criticism that would be reflected in all my works in future years.

In my installation called Abstract Allegory, the title under which I have gathered four different personal stories from different stages of my life I do not allegorize. On the contrary, I look for answers indirectly for the government’s allegories, for the tyranny of political, legal and social mechanisms to which I am subjected. At the same time, this is an attempted transparent settlement with the social memory beginning withmy own memory,. This way I intend to archive an experience for which allegory is assumed necessary, via rational data through art. Thus fiction functions in the opposite direction that is; my breaking free from allegory.

Abstract Allegory is a decryption that I dedicate, based on selected details of my personal life history, to all personal life histories. It belongs to the projection of my personal struggle against an opposite allegory of a historical reality that for many years I was permitted to fictionalize only allegorically.