images | text

Meriç Algün Ringborg
Born in 1983 in Istanbul, Turkey / Lives in Stockholm, Sweden

Adriano Pedrosa (AP): Your double presence in the biennial articulates themes of national identity, borders, and translation related to GonzalezTorres’s “Untitled” (Passport), and themes of the double, symmetry, and love, as in his “Untitled” (Ross). Tell me about Ö (The Mutual Letter) (2011). How is the sound installation different from the printed version?

Meriç Algün Ringborg (MAR): Since I moved to Stockholm in 2007, I wanted to collect all the words that are exactly the same in Swedish and Turkish. Only recently was I able to go through the lengthy process of inspecting the two dictionaries, and selecting the words that are spelled and mean the same. In the biennial, my work will be in two parts. The printed pieces take the form of a quite peculiar dictionary, consisting of the 1,270 identical words. Like Gonzalez-Torres’s “Untitled” (Passport), viewers will have the chance to take copies of my dictionary. The second part consists of a two-hour audio recording of all of these words read by my partner and me. Although it might sound like I am unsuccessfully mimicking him, we are in fact speaking our own languages.

AP: Is Gonzalez-Torres an important reference for you?

MAR: I have always felt an affinity with Gonzalez-Torres, although I was born nearly two decades after him. If an artist works with these themes, there are often underlying personal reasons and experiences. With Gonzalez-Torres, the nuance is that while it is personal, it is not introverted; it is engaged, and it is there to make a difference. Moreover, he maintains a formal concern and rigor that makes it impossible to perceive his work as accidental. Naturally I enjoy artists who make other types of works, but I must  say there are not many artists like him from whom I feel I can draw references.

AP: How are you working through themes of the foreign and the familiar, the personal and the political, home and not-home? 

MAR: I moved from Istanbul to Stockholm because of love. It is, as with most love stories, far too complex to convey with words and perhaps uninteresting to those not involved. It is enough to say that, as a consequence, I was in a new home instead of my old home. This made cultural identity, language, belonging, and bureaucracy of moving across borders increasingly compelling subjects to me, as I had to apply, wait, be evaluated, and deemed fit to fit into this new society. By appropriating the methodology of collecting, systematizating, and list making, I began working with and against these themes. For instance, The Concise Book of Visa Application Forms (2009–11), which is part of the “Untitled” (Passport) show, is the first work I produced in relation to these themes using this methodology. I was not trying to point a finger at these issues, I was just trying to underline the structures that surround us, to punctuate them and make them visible. I believe I will continue working like this, since unfortunately as subjects they are hard to exhaust.