Untitled #1, 1998 [Enlarge in New Window]

Gulgun Kayim: Self-Portrait

Five days after Gülgün Kayim was born on Cyprus, the first shot was fired in a nightmarish conflict between its Greek majority and Turkish minority populations. From 1963 to 1974, Cyprus was ravaged by civil war, culminating in invasion by the mainland Turkish government and the sequestering of each group on opposite sides of the island. Amid this turmoil, when Kayim was five, her Turkish family fled to London.

A legacy of fear and displacement from those years feeds her theatrical work—most recently the script-in-progress Self-Portrait . . . for now. With support from Creative Capital, she’s developing the new play with Skewed Visions, the site-specific Minneapolis company she co-founded in 1997. The project rounds off a trio of semi-autobiographical works that began with Untitled #1 (1998) and The Orange Grove (2003). As she writes this newest segment she’ll also revisit the others, combining all three into a full-evening event.

The trilogy is Kayim’s attempt to reassemble her smudged recollections of childhood. Untitled #1 is the most impressionistic of the three, evoking wartime terror through refugee-populated landscapes constructed of boots, doorways, and trash. The Orange Grove merges scenes from her father’s boyhood with surreal snippets of her family’s exodus. Characters cram themselves into cupboards and suitcases and drop armfuls of pots and pans, as a distraught little girl looks on.

Self-Portrait . . . for now is similarly burdened by the past, and hinges on coincidences such as the fateful time around Kayim’s birth. But by broaching the theme of return, it’s also a leap into the present. Most of the raw material was generated when she set foot on Cyprus in 2004 for the first time in 29 years, traveling on a Bush Foundation grant to interview Turkish Cypriots. The boundary between the two sides had just been opened, allowing for interactions between divided Nicosians for the first time since the invasion. Those who had ventured across the line spoke mournfully to Kayim of cherished neighborhoods now bulldozed, or the decay of once-elegant hotels. The visit infused her writing with the sense of acute loss that haunts abandoned districts there, “like pain in an amputated limb.”

If the trilogy appears to lack a linear narrative, Kayim points out, it’s because memory, especially through a child’s eyes, is rarely coherent. Yet the scenes are so tactile you feel you could step into them—indeed, Skewed Visions’s three-dimensional aesthetic invites you to do so. Audiences viewed Orange Grove, for example, by following characters through an old munitions plant, which Kayim had chosen for its cavernous architecture. The setting folded Minneapolis’s history of weapons manufacturing into what might otherwise feel, to Midwestern audiences, like a foreign tragedy. It’s a connection she intends to draw again when she premieres the entire trilogy in spring 2008.

Kayim’s inventive use of space has earned comparisons with the late Polish designer/director Tadeusz Kantor, and she’s studied object-based improv techniques with Ludmila Ryba, a former member of his company. Like Kantor, she’s obsessed with sorting through the past; she’s keenly aware that this is something her homeland must do as well, before it can embrace reunification.

Unfortunately, as Self-Portrait Trilogy illustrates, accounts of the past can be slippery. “When the communities were sealed off, each decided what its history was going to be, and the narratives are diametrically opposed,” she says, explaining that the Greeks have virtually erased the bloody memory of 1963-74, while Turkish survivors are fixated on that era. “Some people refuse to return. My own mother says, ‘To go to the border is a recognition that I forgive, and I do not.’”

To complete her research, Kayim will make a pilgrimage to the southern city where her mother grew up. She hopes her mother will relent and accompany her. “Self-Portrait is about me,” she reflects, “but it’s told through the refraction of many people’s stories. It’s a self-portrait because the history of Cyprus is who I am.”

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THIS PROJECT'S CATEGORIES: Performance > Installation | Performance Art / Theater / Spoken Word | Turkish Themes | History | Midwest | 2006