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Pluto, the former ninth planet of our solar system, discovered in 1930, was demoted to “dwarf planet” in 2006, breaking the hearts of 90s kids everywhere. The enduring interest in Pluto’s re/declassification was made evident this year, when several sites for space enthusiasts released stories stating that NASA had reinstated the celestial body to its former planetary status. As it turns out, the joke was not so far from reality: a recent proposal, led by Alan Stern, the principal investigator of the New Horizons mission to Pluto, claims that the current definition accepted by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) is “too narrow and doesn’t jibe with what people understand planets to be,” and suggests a reclassification which might allow for Pluto’s reinstatement if accepted by IAU.

Işıl Eğrikavuk, Pluto's Kitchen, “Song of Blue Cheese: My heart was cold and blue as ice before I met you,” 2017. Courtesy of Block Universe and Open Space Contemporary. © Martina O'Shea

In her most recent work, Pluto’s Kitchen, Istanbul based artist, Işıl Eğrikavuk mines Pluto’s planetary demotion and break-ups to address Brexit. The performance, co-commissioned by Block Universe and Open Space Contemporary London, is a kind of participatory dinner theatre, which plays at the ideas of borders and inclusion amidst Pluto’s taxonomic dramas. Texts taken from Pluto’s transitional history are mixed with quotes from British Prime Minister Theresa May and “tips on surviving a break up” gleaned from self-help websites directed toward women. Performers read them like forlorn love letters pulled from back pockets and bra straps between courses of a dinner Eğrikavuk designed with a local chef to reflect the “phases” of a love affair and breakup: a “growing pie,” “a roast from the heart,” a “flowering soil.”

Actor 2

Dear Pluto, there is one last thing I want to say before I say goodbye.
I am the world, the earth, the source of life.
Years will go by, humans will die, and so will their borders
Yet, you and I will stay alive,
And continue our eternal drive

Actor 3

#5 Be honest but sensitive. No one likes to get dumped. But we at least appreciate the truth when it's over. Unless, of course, the truth is, you've met someone better, or that you're just plain bored with the relationship.

Actor 4

So my dear friends, let me say this.
We will continue to be reliable partners, willing allies and close friends. We still want to buy your goods and services, sell you ours, trade with you as freely as possible, and work with one another to make sure we are all safer, more secure and more prosperous through continued friendship.

Işıl Eğrikavuk, Pluto's Kitchen, 2017. Courtesy of Block Universe and Open Space Contemporary. © Martina O'Shea

Pluto’s Kitchen echoes a career-long commitment to wedding narratives of love, geopolitics, and mythology through an interweaving of fiction and fact, document and fable. Eğrikavuk, who earned her undergraduate degree at Istanbul’s Boğaziçi University in literature and her MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Performance, has been playing at the edges of fact and fiction, journalism and storytelling, throughout her career. Upon returning to Istanbul after school, she worked as a journalist covering local news and writing the weekly column “High on Contemporary Art,” where she commented on the intersection of daily news and contemporary art for the national newspaper Radikal for three years. The series played on the trope of “Dear Abby,” wherein often-fictional readers would write in with questions.

Image from Pars Pınarcıklığlu’s “3P” project for Taksim Square

From “Dear Abby” letters to daytime talks shows, from pop music to fairy tales, Eğrikavuk uses strategies of entertainment and fiction to open up the rigid binary narratives of geopolitical news and to invite alternative, sometimes whimsical or absurd re-imaginings. Her 2012 collaboration with Turkish artist and filmmaker Jozef Amado, Change Will Be Terrific, presciently addressed the then-unknown future of Taksim Square a year before municipal plans to “pedestrianize” Taksim sparked protests in Gezi Park and the violent attacks on protestors by police. Change Will Be Terrific, performed at SALT in its since-closed Beyoğlu location, was presented as a live taping of a daytime TV talk show with real and fictional guests including Egyptian writer Amira Hanafi, chef Yasser Dallal, and architect Pars Pınarcıklığlu who introduced his “3P” plan for Taksim. The “3P” project proposes that Turkey buy three significant architectural wonders from its neighbors—the Pyramids of Egypt, the Greek Parthenon, and Palmyra from Syria—and exhibit them alternately in Taksim Square, functioning as a form of “aid” to Turkey’s neighbors and a solution to what Pınarcıklığlu identifies as Turkey’s failure to produce new cultural sites. The talk show concludes with “Karar Bizim” (Our Decision), a song written with and performed by rap artist Fuat Ergin. Further pointing to the porous border between fiction and reality, “Our Decision” later became an oft-sung anthem of protestors in Gezi Park.

Time to Sing a New Song

More recently, Eğrikavuk’s video Time to Sing a New Song was turned off by municipal police, purportedly due to an anonymous complaint. The looped animation of a female figure with the text “Finish up your apple, Eve!” had been installed on a screen atop the Marmara Pera Hotel as part of the community-driven public art project YAMA. With no clear answer for why the piece was removed, Eğrikavuk and her students produced a performance out of the experience. After reading and performing a modern fairytale version of Adam and Eve, in which Adam works for the municipality and Eve works as cleaning staff for the hotel, Eğrikavuk connected speakers to her phone and called the municipality offices to enquire about her censored artwork. Performers danced to hold music for 15 minutes before everyone shared the frustration as the artist received only delays and vague answers. Eğrikavuk later received an email citing “visual pollution” as the reason for the removal of the work and YAMA’s other projects—a statement anyone familiar with the visual landscape of Istanbul, filled with ubiquitous advertisements and video screens, would find laughable.

Işıl Eğrikavuk, Pluto's Kitchen, 2017. Courtesy of Block Universe and Open Space Contemporary. © Martina O'Shea

Jacques Rancière once noted that “the real has to be fictionalized in order to be thought.” In our current international climate—wherein censorship seems ever expanding, facts are “alternative,” reality in politics and media seems up for grabs, and the status of the nation, or even a planet, is uncertain—Eğrikavuk’s absurd fictions offer a tactic not only for criticism but for survival and sustenance. She never discounts the impact of popular culture or entertainment on the imagination—and on our social and political realities. Her practice weaves humor and the vision of another possible into the fabric of what makes up our daily lives: daytime TV, shared meals, the stories we tell. As Eğrikavuk herself puts it: “Fairytales and stories are often considered to be ‘light’ or ‘feminine’ or ‘childish,’ but actually they are so powerful. Because they are not direct—they appeal to this other thing—and there is so much power to the child’s imagination we all carry.”

Işıl Eğrikavuk’s Pluto’s Kitchen will take place May 30th in London. Book here.

Eğrikavuk and Josef Erçevik Amado’s collaboration, Every Kind of Myth is Written With Care / Her Türlü Mit Özenle Yazılır (2015), is currently included in After the Fact, an exhibition at Lenbachhaus in Munich exploring contemporary art in relationship to propaganda in the 21st century, May 30–September 17.

—Danyel Ferrari

Danyel M. Ferrari is an artist and independent researcher currently based in Istanbul, Turkey.

(Image at top: Işıl Eğrikavuk, Pluto's Kitchen, 2017. Courtesy of Block Universe and Open Space Contemporary. © Martina O'Shea)