SYSTEM ERROR​

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"An artist’s attitude towards a self-edited publication about him/herself always differs from that of art historians, curators, writers, and sociologists. Ali Cabbar doesn’t follow a chronological theme in System Error. The visuals, made up of works from different periods created under different circumstances, strike through the pages one after the other, displaying the path of the artist from his start to the present without a temporal or spatial reference, hence in a way removing themselves from the fictional aesthetics of art history. What interests me as an art historian are the variations created by this “elegant tripping up of art history.” In other words, how can we look at an artist’s works without the interference of categorisations?

System Error views the artist with a visceral impulse all while aiming to map a different visuality by pushing aside the connections between the years, themes, and techniques. Can this be considered an act of drawing up new memories? Are we facing a Dadaist performance that pushes aside relationality? What would we see if we were to follow an artist’s formation processes through the tracks defined by him/her?

Cabbar’s book provides multi-layered visual answers to these and similar questions. Both the images and hashtags referring to social media tools—which create the layers in the book—suggest that Cabbar has attempted to map not only his own works, but also the sociopolitical events of the years between 1980-2020 to which he has been witness. This has prompted four different identities as the basis in designing the book: Prisoner, Fugitive, Refugee, Exile.”

​Excerpt from Necmi Sönmez's text in the book.

Design: Ali Cabbar
Editor: Başak Şenova

Publisher: Masa Yayınları, 2020

Full-color print, 160 pages, 21 × 27 cm 

In English