Awaiting the Onset of the Sense of Life

HD video, 3.20 min., 2013

“Mourning: not a crushing oppression, a jamming (which would suppose a ‘refill’), but a painful availability: I am vigilant, expectant, awaiting the onset of the ‘sense of life’. 8 December”

Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary

“The union of soul and body is not an amalgamation between two mutually external terms…

We connect with other beings only and only through our body.”

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception

Öğrenci explores the use of electricity and sensor technology in public and private spaces, and questions their relationship to body and space. The video Awaiting the onset of the sense of life shows the bathroom of a bar in Munich. In the video artist body moves in the tiny, claustrophobic bathroom. The position of the body makes the electricity and the space visible, while activating its components at the same time. The electricity and the light in the videos become part of the body, similar to cell phones that grow into an extension of our hands.

The elements of anxiety, repetition, light and darkness reflect the artist’s state of mind in her “dark” days—that “waiting” period. For the artist, the beginning of her artistic production evokes the idea of electricity, something like a lightning. In her words, “I felt like a cloud full of electricity on a cloudy day—somber and ready to explode!”