In this work, Nasan Tur examines the political potential of language and the city as an activist space. The six prints in the limited edition City says … are based on an ongoing work of the same name since 2008, which can take different forms depending on the location and in which the messages on the walls of cities give rise to individual portraits of moods. Over a certain period of time, Tur collected graffiti on the streets of six very different cities in which he had spent time on exhibition projects: Belgrade, Ljubljana, Milan, Stuttgart, Vienna and his chosen home of Berlin. In the performative action Berlin says …, which was staged at Hamburger Bahnhof and at Tanas, the artist sprayed the slogans he had collected in Berlin – “Sandra I Love You”, “Soldiers are murderers”, “No Respect”, “Your pen is a weapon” etc … – onto a wall with a spray can until an almost monochrome surface was created by superimposing the messages. For the edition, Tur translated the city portraits created so far into prints. The graffiti were handwritten on metal plates using the soft-ground etching technique and then etched in an acid bath. When printed in six colors, they appear mirror-inverted on the paper. The individual words and their messages can no longer be deciphered as they are superimposed to form differently shaped clouds of color that intensify towards the center. In their individual accumulation, they reflect a kind of mood – interpreted by the artist’s hand – of the respective city at a certain point in time.
“City says … is an ongoing work that I have already made in all kinds of cities around the world. For me, it is a series of contemporary city portraits. While roaming the streets for weeks at a time, I collect hundreds of graffiti sprayed or painted on facades. As I am particularly interested in the potential activism in the population of each city, I only collect things that have been written on the walls with the intention of being read and understood by others. The facades of a city are a platform for people to publicly express their thoughts, desires, dreams, opinions, demands, and so on. When you read them, you find out what society is thinking at the time. I then carry out a performance in which I spray the graffiti I have collected in countless concentrated layers on the same wall.”1
Text: Eva Scharrer
1 Nasan Tur in an E-Mail to the author dated July 30, 2022.