The feeling when a dog needs to go outside, but the „owner” is way too lazy to go because they’re hungover, hungry, or on top of it all – it’s raining. Or vice versa, what if a person wants to cuddle their cat, but the cat doesn’t want to? Endless ideas running round and round… Who becomes the one waiting?

The exhibition Dog’s Tears refers to power relations accompanying dynamic interpersonal or interspecies attitudes. Erdemir connects figurative drawing practice with autofictional stories, which subsequently appear in site-specific installations. In the drawings, we can recognize non-human entities that together bring about situations creating interspecies communication tensions in everyday lives.

To dig a hole and hide a secret message in it. To find engulfing darkness harboring an excess of grim and mystical beliefs. A jumble of corridors and nooks opening the way to other worlds. What is your deep secret desire? And can it be pulled to the surface? Places with no daylight draw us deeper and deeper. If you close your eyes, you might find yourself there, who knows. Mysterious shadows and places surrounded by cold.

Günbike Erdemir works with story motifs, which she later then transforms into her own fantasy world. These stories are often based on underground queer theory or erotic literature, such as the work of the queer writer Küçük İskender. The exhibition Dog’s Tears is inspired by cave spaces – places where all kinds of human and non-human entities hide. These are the main causes of the tension that the caves hide. But Günbike isn’t looking for answers and strategies to unravel the truth and meaning of the stories. She does not create hope, but on the contrary, encourages us to explore the deep hiding places that we as individual or collective entities can imagine in individual stories. Working with shadows, looking for traces and our own associations can step into individual acts, the creators of which are as much ourselves as, indirectly, those whose reflections make up the world on the prison walls of our Plato’s cave.

A specific feature of hierarchical relationships is that even after realizing one’s own position, we are often not able to move from one place. Hidden masochistic tendencies help us persist in the concepts and idealizations we have become accustomed to over time. The level of adoration towards the person in a position of power deepens directly with the belief that the idea of change becomes inherent. Parts of these relationships tend to be the means of controlling the level of power. Between the dog and the “owner” it is a collar and a leash, while precisely in Plato’s cave puppets of the shadow theater hold this power. We can try to get out of the collar, break out of the leash or leave the cave. Behind the vision of rebellion, however, remains the question of what actually awaits us outside the well-known, settled hierarchies. The unfulfillable collective idea thus, after surfacing, brings us all back to a place of solitude. What to do when the old fear of dominion is replaced by a new, unknown fear of freedom?

A blue light on the face in the middle of the darkness. The need for constant control. The desire to be somewhere, but nowhere. The idea of falling deeply into the imaginary boundaries of hatching organisms. Unable to really keep any secrets, even their own are a burden. What determines the power of a secret? Maybe that it it not your own but someone else’s secret. How much is it worth to keep a „big secret“? And maybe, in the end, all these big secrets are not that important.

— Collective Cejla (Kristýna Gajdošová, Barbora Ilič, Risto Ilič, Monika Rygálová and Tereza Vinklárková) and Günbike Erdemir