Timeserving Cards, 2020
Card deck, 80 cards, 8x 11 cm
Edition: 100 in Turkish, 100 in English
Published by onagöre
These photographs capture moments of feeling, thinking and trying to make sense of the world whilst looking at a body of water or a bunch of stones, gazing at the ground or the air, or even when staring at an armchair. In order to deal with the fears and anxieties of the future, Gizem Karakas reinterprets the methods of prophecy, such as tarot reading and astrology, that mediate the desire to predict the future, with the instinct to create performance and collective processes, which she frequently uses as a method in her practice. In Timeserving Cards she combined the emotions she chose from the Dictionary of Feelings with the images she selected from her analog and polaroid photo archive.
Remembering the Future, 2020-2021
as part of Re: [aap_2019], Arter Research Programme’s publication
The publication titled Re: [aap_2019], produced in conjunction with the inaugural edition of the Arter Research Programme that took place between October 2019 and July 2020, follows the trajectory of the individual researches of participants and the collective experience shared throughout the programme. Comprised of ten separate booklets, the publication delineates the visible and invisible intersections among the participants’ respective contributions and the collective process that informed the publication. Borrowing its title from the e-mail group used by the participants during the programme, Re: [aap_2019] is presented as a bilingual (Turkish and English) limited and numbered edition.
Remembering the Future is a series of five stories, about anxiety-filled moments when the need to read fortunes was felt, accompanied by the cards Gizem Karakaş drew from Timeserving Cards. The narrator, who makes you feel that the stories’ heroines are in control of their past, present, future, feelings and thoughts, lightens the burden by voicing the tensions in the lives she interprets like a good fortune teller. Karakaş reflects on the subject’s will to direct her destiny and the potential for change by focusing on intersubjective situations such as the transference between women from different generations in a family, the neighbor haunting a woman living on her own, the up and down relationship with an avocado, and the romantic ties between the heroes of the television series.
Timeserving Cards, Interactive Reading, 2023
Duration: 45 min.
Chert Lüdde Gallery, Berlin
On the occasion of the closing of Zora Mann's exhibition Nectar Hive at Chert Lüdde Gallery in Berlin, Gizem Karakas led visitors on a journey through their emotions and feelings using her Timeserving Cards. The participants were first divided into groups and then invited to select one of Zora Mann's sculptures from the exhibition and sit in front of it. The reading consisted of three parts: a memory, a current feeling, and a fortune for the future. For each part, the participants took turns picking cards and sharing their personal readings, before being invited to reflect on a collective reading for the sculpture.
