Hüseyin Bahri Alptekin
These early works by Alptekin were made originally for an exhibition about the influential German artist Joseph Beuys at the Goethe Institut in the city of Izmir on Turkey’s western coast. Whilst completing his thesis at the Sorbonne in Paris entitled “The Shamanic Element in Works of Art”, he naturally became interested in Beuys, and in the latter part of the 1980s he would increasingly spend time in Berlin. Whilst being Beuys’ initials, the letters ”J” and “B” on the work J&B are also in the same style as the J&B whisky brand. The word “Eurasia” – the name for the combined landmass of Europe and Asia – is repeated across these images, which was a term Beuys used in numerous artworks including a renowned performance titled EURASIENSTAB (EURASIAN STAFF) in Antwerp in 1968. Beuys used the term as a way to try and transgress notions of East and West, and to introduce transcendental thinking into his practice. These were formative works for Alptekin towards his ways of considering ideas of distance and otherness.