Rotor
A nine-minute single-channel video that moves through five rotating systems and the dust each one produces. It opens with the binary stars of BD +20 307, surrounded by a debris field from two planets that collided inside the system. From there it turns to the eighteenth-century aquatint box, a wooden chamber in which resin dust suspended in air settles onto a copper plate before acid bites the image into metal. The third part sits with a household vacuum cleaner and the memory of a father sucking mosquitoes off the bedroom ceiling. The fourth follows the Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk, a military rotor named after a Native war leader and used from Grenada to Afghanistan. The last moves to the Nile perch and the Bodélé Depression, the dried floor of an ancient lake in the Sahara whose dust is carried across the Atlantic by wind and falls on the Amazon as fertilizer made from the bones of its fish.
Rotation produces dust at every size, from planetary collisions to the suction of a motor in a bedroom, and the residue always travels. Acid etches a copper plate while pigment lifts and resettles, a helicopter rotor beats the air as it carries its machine, a vacuum pulls the dead weight of a room into a bag, and the floor of a dried lake rises on the wind to reach a forest thousands of kilometers away. The video treats these as versions of the same event.
Violence is the operator that turns bodies into circulation. A recurring subtitle describes the body as stretched around a circular space, no longer held at a single point, a spaghetti, and the work returns to this image in each of its five parts. A planet ends up as a cloud of debris, a mosquito lives on as a ghost inside a motor, a grain of a lover settles in a vacuum bag, and a Nile perch becomes the mineral that feeds a tree on another continent.
The aquatint box is the work’s analogy for itself. Dust settles on a plate, acid bites into it, and an image comes out, a primitive camera whose subject is violence. The helicopter performs the violence and the box records it, and the video works the same way, catching what rotation has already dispersed and holding it long enough to be read.
“In his video piece Rotor, Kerem Ozan Bayraktar brings together several narratives in which particles migrate from one location to the other. Dust itself is accumulated through cycles of growth, decay, conflict, and repose. In the video, he lists the constituents of dust as: ‘fragments of migrating corpses, bits of my lover, ghost in the machine.’ Collisions form clouds of dust around planets, resin dust creates images on metal plates, dust travels from the Bodele Depression to the Amazon, providing nutrition for entire forests. By bringing forward these micro and macro journeys of dust and happenings at sites of varying sizes (a box, a home, a desert, a galaxy) Bayraktar also highlights the non-hierarchical qualities of dust: a space in which humans and non-humans merge into one another, dissolving boundaries, occupying multiple temporalities at once, building a continuous stream.”
Gulsah Mursaloglu, “A Continuous Stream”, in Sandstorm, ed. Sarah Maske, 2020, Istanbul
Exhibitions
- Sandstorm: And Then There Was Dust