Ahmet Oğüt & Cevdet Erek: Ahmet Cevdet Bey Presents Tunnel of Fear

December 2011. See the entire magazine online here

Overgaden, Copenhagen

3 September – 6 November

By Mark Rappolt

Seven-ninths of Bobbi Ahmet Cevdet Bey is the Frankensteinian amalgamation of two prominent Turkish artists: Ahmet Oğüt and Cevdet Erek. (For completists, the ‘Bey’ bit is a traditional honorific in Turkish and Arab countries, these days broadly equivalent to ‘Mr’.) So naturally this show – their first as a single entity – is a little freakish, arranged as a hall of mirrors-style procession, with something of a carnival atmosphere to it. As the show begins, and presumably to make sure you’ve got the sideshow vibe, there’s even a photograph of the two-headed artist (shot from the rear) wearing an unusually wide suit jacket as he salutes the exterior of a pair of twin tower blocks joined by a DNA-like spiral staircase. The jacket is on display later in the show, hanging across the backs of a pair of chairs, as is a camellike hanger – a single bar sporting two hooks on two humps. For all the promise of fear, this show is as much about humour and a sense of almost surreal, Siamese oddity as anything else.

In essence, Tunnel of Fear is a suite of rooms crammed (but not so that you would feel it too oppressively), Tardis-like, into the top floor of Overgaden’s two-storey space. There are some umbrella hats – the kind of gimmicky device (a plastic frame to fit round the head, supporting a miniature umbrella that would protect you little better than a good hat) that one associates with tourists and clowns – hanging next to the entrance. Some people put them on. I don’t. We enter a darkened neon-lit room with more of the white umbrella hats clustered on the ceiling, like a bunch of stray helium balloons. Meanwhile, a cheap flapping toy bird (the kind that a clown sells to a tourist on the street) on a wire circles like an angry pigeon just above our heads. If I already ducked the umbrella hat I want to duck more literally now.

In addition to the birds, the umbrellas, the beaded curtains and the weird assemblies of tat you might pick up in any low-budget urban street market, the tunnel takes you past photographs of magic acts and a variety of fairground-style interactive objects activated by buttons that mayor may not provoke an action. At the centre of it all is a white room with that jacket stretched over the chairs. The assemblage faces three closed doors – one for each artist plus one for the pair’s alter ego? Perhaps not. Perhaps the third marks a space for the spectator to pass through. To paraphrase that great theorist of carnival, Mikhail Bakhtin, this is a performance but there are no footlights: there is no distinction between actors and spectators, which is pretty good going for artists attempting to make a singularity of themselves.