Words can be “#pointless #low #unprecedented #confession #relief #sweat [. . .] ”; these particular ones linked to other websites from the homepage of hashwords.net, a continuously updated index of 2,753 hashtagged words chosen by Deniz Gül, for which an algorithm trawls 75,000 online news sites to find examples of their latest usage. The web platform, #Words (2021), points to the artist’s abiding interests in “how to monitor the involvement and effects of words in periods of economic, ecological, and social crisis.” Run for two-months until June 13, #Words is a parallel project to Gül’s multi-part exhibition “Scratch and Surface,” which spanned the spaces of SALT Galata, in Istanbul, as part of SALT’s yearlong Sequential program.

“Scratch and Surface” embraces language’s fluidity and contingency, where meanings are continuously constructed and deformed. To that end, it is hard to disentangle the interrelated works. The exhibition’s guidebook can be considered Klavuz [Plungr] (2016–21), which comprises the pages of a Turkish spelling book that Gül annotated in red pen, line by line, making playful additions, subtractions, and other “corrections” to a catalogue of lexicographic orthodoxy. In a similar gesture of unmaking/remaking, Gül conceived of Daire Düz [Flat] (2021) as an ongoing action in which a mason outlines small, room-like spaces within a large, open gallery using a single layer of concrete blocks, only to later remove them and construct new outlined foundations in a continuous process. While punning on the possible translations of both words as “flat” (düz means “smooth” or “even,” and daire is an “apartment”) or as “straight” and “circle,” respectively, the work alludes to the metaphorical relationship between the language of our private or interior lives, and the larger communal spaces of public life, between which the process of translation is often continuously in flux and anything but a smooth, or linear, journey toward understanding.