Failure Cut, Family Graveyard

"As I was saying hum, hum was happening. I was saying haw and haw was happening. With a mildly higher voice, my chin a little bit up, eyes staring just above the horizon like trying to remember a name that was forgotten three times before, I was inside a bus traveling with 120 km/h and I was about to give advices to the passengers: “We are so different and we are right to be different”. In fact my actual duty inside this bus was to sleep."

“Ayfer Karabıyık focuses on the suspension that results from repetition—of sounds, images, things as we know them—through the two text pieces she included in Failure Cut Family Graveyard. [This publication] is an interpretation of [those] moments when words lose their meaning, when we repeat them to ourselves, or when an image starts to become blurry and unclear upon closer inspection. Karabıyık evokes and expands these moments through claiming that suspended moment as a materiality in her texts.

Karabıyık works with the ability of text to extend and shrink sounds to produce moments of suspension that are, in turn, reflected in the physicalities we project on to what we are reading. This work serves as a subtitle to the artist’s practice, as she always deals with the fickleness of what we see or sense, stretching-out the words and sounds comprising the narratives of what we could be looking at. This gesture of making visible the artifice of language as a slippery conveyor of meaning transforms this book into a text that one can’t help but return to multiple times, each time deriving different interconnections between the words on the page.”
– Merve Ünsal, Speculation as Method