A VILLAGE, A SONG, AN ALBUM AND A LINE
Ayla Ödekan, November 2010

A VILLAGE
The village is a habitation created approximately 10.000 years before our day. The village habitation bears the traces of humankind passing from the stage of consuming the nature by “migration” to the stage when they realized the fertility of the “land”. First, human beings were singular as individuals but later, they moved onto an organized social life and leaving certain objects of the nature such as sun, water and fire aside, communed with the earth and worshipped it.  The land belonged to the humankind and the humankind belonged to the land. They looked after it and it have them life. As years passed, they continued to produce and consume the fertility of the land. At first, the village was happy but then the “existent” and the “non-existent” confronted each other and there was a battle between the opposites. The communities battled. Force came to power. As the individuals formed societies, they went through the process of acculturation and became individuals again. While they used to fight in order to exist, now they were fighting to live. As they communed with their earth, the earth slid under their feet and they "migrated” once more to other lands. It is a difficult thing to lose one’s living space. It is a difficult thing to lose one’s mountains, water, air, smell, taste, color, sound, people, animals and objects and so is life turning into images in the memory and being suspended there. How can it be possible for such things to be wiped away?  

A SONG
A song of longing… The song of the grandfather who had migrated from Prizren to Anatolia echoes in space. It doesn’t die away with time. It passes on to the father who passes it on to his children with his harmonica. The child grows up with that song. The word coalesces with the sound, transcends time and spreads all over space. The words falling down from that song collide with images and turn into names:
far away                   that
                                            curiosity
                                       remote                mother
eye        
    where
  trouble
    village                                look
                cry

AN ALBUM
That song of longing finds its way into the memory of Nazli Eda Noyan and nourishing and shaping with the images in her mind, sprouts into life again.  This is the story of a village. It is important to share the traces of the feeling of experience and longing. Photographs are disposed in albums where moments are documented as they are. The image is what it is… without anything being added or subtracted… Photographs carry the moment into the future. The perception of the viewer carries the unmediated images in the photographs into life and re-fictionalizes them. Noyan produces her own album. “A family album of those living in that village... The people who have a place in the memory of that village... fastened buttons, coats, ties, badges, glasses, flags, hands, lovers, monsters, men, men, men, men, women… This is a place that lives and breathes, is already deceased, creepy, longed for, and far away and so close, amusing and dark.” Noyan's album is loaded with a world that is out of her control. It’s all there: a goddess whom men are pursuing, the seducers, the seduced, politicians, soldiers, bureaucrats, aristocrats, protesters, the clergyman of the village, people praying, a funeral… In some places, a portrait is revealed as an individual, at other places, the community that has lost its identity forms a difficult pattern, which is open to discovery.

A LINE
Noyan fictionalizes her world of images from the newspaper clippings that she has accumulated. The difference in time and space carried that life from natural images to the images determined by the communication instruments enriched by technological progress. Haven’t the communication instruments been the perception channel of our memory? In our day, the communication instruments, enabling us to share our experiences, thoughts and senses, establish the communication between the individuals, inform, direct and educate them, makes up the social communication, expresses the feelings, entertains and cautions. Noyan sails into the world of images fictionalized by the newspapers. The heart of the album lies in the line. Didn’t the image begin to find its meaning with the line? Wasn't it the line that animated the meaning? Didn’t Mehmet Siyah Kalem convey the nomadic social life to our day with all its beauty, tensions and livelihood? Noyan fictionalizes the world of the “modern nomadic” society with the dynamism of the line. Are we not nomads? Have we not migrated into a virtual space? It is no doubt that Mengü Ertel, the contemporary master of the togetherness of the line and the meaning is also the master of Noyan. It is visible that Nazli has also tried to achieve ability of giving life to objects with lines possessed by Ertel, who is the master of integrating the graphic arts with meaning. She steps up to this purpose with her unique form. The movement of the lines adds a dimension to the visual order, gives mass to form, reveals the identities, emphasizes the power and contributes new meanings to the eyes. Hands become clenched fists, reach afar or pray. Certain examples wait to be realized in the details. Among the mass creating a pattern with the repetition of a single motif, a hand over the left side of the chest catches one’s eye. A penis sexualizes the pattern as soon as it's realized. The works may be related to each other. A man and a woman gazing at each other display their coyness with hands clasping on their knees. The album, which was brought into life first by being drawn, using a pen, is transformed through the means of a computer. At certain places, color also contributes to the meaning. The politician, bureaucrat and army used as indicators of power are distinguished from the other works by a yellow or red line or ground. The song spreads all over the space from Nazli Eda Noyan’s album:
It was a small village house somewhere far away
 It bleeds within me and adds a thousand troubles to my troubled say…