This installation by Günaydın during her residency at Saha Studio features the word "MUSSAKHAN," rendered in metal using the bespoke typeface "HAMASET." Mounted on a form referencing a T-Wall Barrier mold structure commonly associated with separation and militarized landscapes, the work evokes concrete barricades, highlighting tensions of physical and symbolic division. It was exhibited at the İstanbul Manufacturer Retail Center, resonating with themes of geopolitical and cultural fragmentation.
(Produced as part of my residency at Saha Studio in Istanbul, Turkiye, 2024.)
MUSSAKHAN forms part of A Para-Opera in the Blurst of Times, a long-term project exploring support, resistance, and typographic protest through fragmentary works.
"Para-Opera in the Blurst of Times" unfolding through text, sculpture, installation and performance. The title borrows “the blurst of times” from The Simpsons, where a monkey at a typewriter miswrites Dickens’s “the best of times, the worst of times.” The error becomes a condition: language trying to describe a world that exceeds it. The prefix para- places the work beside opera and outside it. Each movement begins with language already in circulation and takes form through a particular political and material situation.
The word Musakhan means “something that is reheated.” It’s also the name of a Palestinian dish—bread, onions, chicken, sumac, and olive oil—but what interested me was the word itself: the act of warming something that once held heat. The word isn’t limited to physical warmth; it also speaks of activation, reactivation, stimulation, and keeping something alive. But over time, I realized that the act of “reheating” changes direction depending on who performs it; in some hands, it becomes a method of survival, while in others, a way for power to keep oppression warm.
Powder-coated metal, 300 x 200 x 132 cm.
View from the "MUSSAKHAN " at IMÇ.
View from the "MUSSAKHAN " at IMÇ.
View from the "MUSSAKHAN " at IMÇ.