Dorian Sari: Post-Truth
Kunstmuseum Basel

The image came to Dorian Sari in a dream: a gun pointed at the artist’s back, prodding into their jacket. With no shooter present, the gun incarnates an abstract threat that follows Sari’s movements, taunting them from behind. The artist has recreated their dream- image in the video Ayayayay (2021)—the first work the viewer encountered in “Post-Truth,” Sari’s solo exhibition at Kunstmuseum Basel. In its glitched sequences, Sari appears panic-stricken, running from the gun’s potential of violence. Yet with the object physically adhered to their back, Sari is unable to escape from the unseen source of danger.

The menacing power of an all-encompassing violence was thematized throughout Sari’s exhibition. With the title “Post-Truth,” Sari invoked a loaded concept that has circulated in recent years. Selected by the Oxford English Dictionary as “Word of the Year” in 2016, post-truth characterizes “circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion or personal belief.” Five years later, politics remains in the throes of a post-truth world, whose intensification is evident everywhere—not least in the hate speech of authoritarian leaders and alt-right networks as well as the denials of racialized violence, climate catastrophes, and the pandemic’s devastation. Spanning sculptural installations, video, and text, Sari’s artistic examination of post-truth is less concerned with the content of “fake news,” but rather with the omnipotent structures of violence that produce and politicize affective states like anger and fear.

Sari’s sparse sculptures conjoin their contextual ambiguity with a sense of anxious tension, both a result of the disorienting landscape of post-truth politics. In Margins (2020), presented in the corridor leading to the first room, the artist installed eight wooden dividers that protrude from black leather-gloved fists attached to the wall. Despite the hegemonic grip on power that the gloved fists symbolize, the wooden structures appear more fragile and playful than their seemingly intended partition and intimidation.

A pile of black balloons spilled out from the corner of the first room. Titled Breakneck (2021), the inflated orbs form an indistinct mass that nonetheless remains marked by each balloon’s individual border, visualizing the world’s proliferating bubbles that inhibit collective solidarity. Baby Tank (2016), a miniature foam sculpture of a military tank, is aimed at the balloons, threatening to destroy them. Like post-truth’s mechanisms of concealed violence and ideological distortion, the sculpture’s toylike cuteness and soft materiality obscure its reality of imminent destruction.

In the second of the exhibition’s two rooms, Sari refashioned their dream-image into a sculpture entitled Plastic Fear (2020), in which a pistol points at the back of a leather jacket. With neither a shooter nor a hunted figure present the situation is one of mutual disembodiment that muddles the truth surrounding the sculpture’s context of danger. A buckled leather belt is faceted to the wall at waist level in Untitled (toi, moi, dedans, dehors) (2020), evoking the missing body of its wearer as well as the fetishistic aesthetic of tools used in discipline and violence. Sari poses these two sculptures of bodily absence in relation to Equivoke (2021), an organ-like pink balloon from which Grace Jones’s rendition of “La vie en rose” plays on repeat. The pink balloon is a visual pun of living life through proverbial “rose-tinted glasses,” an empty cliché that evokes the social vacuousness and fragility of optimism amid post-truth’s violent recursions.

Accompanying the exhibition, Sari’s book Texts on Post-Truth, Violence, Anger (2021) assembles writings by the artist on topics ranging from domestic violence and post-gender futures to state- fueled hypocrisies, which are marked by the artist’s outwardly polemical tone. Written in the artist’s broken English, the book foregrounds Sari’s voice within an otherwise minimal exhibition. Its language further emphasizes the culturalist assumptions imposed onto the artist by those who falsely interpret their work as commenting on Turkish politics while ignoring its point of departure—the precarious position and bureaucratic exclusions Sari faces as a noncitizen artist from Turkey based in Switzerland. The book complements “Post-Truth,” an exhibition that incisively recasts without necessarily demystifying the dizzying uncertainties that overwhelm the present.