Romantic Borlakov's new works...

Şener Özmen

I saw Bashir Borlakov's underground works for the first time on Turkey's - wherever Bashir came from and wherever he lives or creates, a side of him is always about Turkey - first current art magazine art-ist Current Art Anthology's 3rd issue published on December 1999. The only noteworthy sign that these works belong to an artist we did not know (we did not know whether or not he was an artist either) was his name written in an unreadable dark purple color - you had to make a special effort for that - on a black background. In the mentioned issue, along with Bashir Borlakov's first creations, respectively, Manifesta 3, Caribbean Biennial, Bülent Şangar who is one of the first generation of contemporary artists from Turkey and recently held an important retrospective exhibition with his artist wife Aydan Murtezaoğlu at Vasıf Kortun-less Salt Beyoğlu, Maurizio Cattelan from the West, again from İstanbul Canan Şenol, Spencer Tunick, Serkan Özkaya and Brener-Schurz duo were featured on the cover. I think shortly after Bashir came to İstanbul, he met Halil Altındere who is the mastermind and one of the fundamental bearers of the magazine, showed him his works, captivated choosy Halil Altındere in an early period with his photograph-heavy portfolio which consisted of ordinary people wearing snow masks and carried Stalinist extensions of a delaminated SSCB and of course the Proletarian ideology. Borlakov came from a Communist social order which was accepted as the worst enemy - all textbooks, imams and capitalists said so - by the official ideology in Turkey for long years, narrated his testimonies and childhood traumas through an intermediate formula - such as the one in Turkey - which only accepts socialist ideology through unofficial Shuttle Trade of duty-free imports and exports centralizing on Laleli which is expressed to be the Russian capital in İstanbul.

In these works, Bashir put the snow mask on the faces of a security guard, a mother with her baby on her lap, an art student making a bust out of clay at a sculpture workshop, a man wearing a white tank top while lying on his bed with the handset on his ear, students coming together in a university canteen; thus showed the İstanbul which was becoming Russian-like, actually quickly becoming a mafia-like environment. Russian-Turkish relations were not new and the founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal, was aware that there were reservations about the approach to Soviet Russia of that era, despite ideological concerns. For this reason, he felt the need to draw thick lines dividing the bilateral relations and ideology of export both with the parliament inside and Soviet Russia outside. The first official initiative to receive help from Russians was a letter Mustafa Kemal wrote to Lenin on April 26, 1920, in which Mustafa Kemal asked for help for the first time from Bolshevik Lenin.

First holistic study of Bashir Borlakov was published, again on the 5th issue (May 2002) of art-ist Current Art Anthology with the title of Goodluck Mr. Borlakov by Şener Özmen. This was also my first encounter with Bashir and his later work.  Bashir was too young, but he lived and created in İstanbul and knew about Istanbul's grotesque face better than me who was making visits to the city for years, and soon ranked among those indispensable for the sprawling current art exhibitions after the 2000s in Turkey. His works were clearly carrying the traces of USSR where he received art and culture education and inspiring artists living and creating in İstanbul and Diyarbakır, two of the most important centers in Turkey in terms of current art.

When Borlakov left Istanbul, this has created an effect similar to Hüseyin Bahri Alptekin's death, an artist who was his close friend and nonetheless a milestone in current art practices in Turkey. Like him, his work was gone; Istanbul was left Bashir-less as the phrase goes, and that was not fair. Wherever he may live, he worked like a proletarian of the former Soviet with his creations in order to know the world and to show his art to the rest of the world. While carrying his photographic process, which began with Gallery Nev in İstanbul and proceeded with Outlet and then Pilot Gallery but did not continue, to a further point; he kept illustrating USSR's industrialization process, its collapse and effects and results of its modernism beginning with Gorbachev, the best way he knew. Based on the concept ofReturn to the Future he borrowed from Boris Groys, he started a new series of photographs. One of the indispensable images in his previous work, the wheelbarrow scene, re-emerged during the processes of Russian-particular discovery and future building. While narrating the gathering moment they developed as a defense mechanism from law enforcement through a dread carnival, he supplemented it with the sad departure of a man carrying air-filled nylon bags (you can remember his cult classic in which he showed a seminude adolescent trying to fly by holding on to the legs of a goose around the magnificent mountains in his geography), though we can not figure out whether he is longing for the past or bitter towards it. Borlakov demonstrated himself as a bodacious romantic in all these works.