Christian Kracht
lskender Yediler and the doors of Tatary
One day, many years ago, someone rang the doorbell at my house in Bangkok. I opened the door and found myself facing a man whose age and origin were hard to tell. He said his name was lskender and he wanted to stay at our house, because he was an artist and had some work to do in Bangkok. I asked him to come in. He took off his shoes, touched the frame of our front door gently with his hand, bowed slightly and stepped into the kitchen where we had a couple of beers together. He knew how to tell a story, and got quite carried away by it. At the moment, he was sculpting mushrooms out of fibreglass, the size of a man.
read moreJeff Wall
Air is free
As the saying goes, “air is free”. In some way this thought appears in Iskender Yediler’s inflatable sculptures. Yediler claims that he began to make inflatables because he was short of storage space and these sculptures responded to the problem. I interpreted this remark as a truth expressed in the language of the sardonic, self-mocking Cologne sensibility so familiar in the circles around Martin Kippenberger. Yediler has belonged to this world, and so in that way has conditionally belonged in Germany, not being a German. If the air weren’t free by nature, there would certainly be national, regional and local airs. In a way, there are, because smells in the air tell strongly of place. But local smell, like the stench of the chemical plants on the Rhine, is mercifully dissolved by the flow of the atmosphere, which moves constantly around the world, accepting and dispersing the impurities constantly forced into it from the ground.
read more