A speculation on a love story

My work titled Ooze emerged from the idea of reimagining a legend shaped around a love story as a mass of water/words that strays from within its established narrative.

Like many others, this legend in its traditional version is told through a plot that celebrates the male body and its endurance, positioning the female character as the central force waiting to be rescued. Rather than retroactively giving the female character a fictional voice from the present day, this work focuses on the conditions that left her voice outside of history, on the frictions and gaps within the narrative itself. By imagining the possibilities lived across three years of imprisonment, it charges the work with a speculative narrative function.

Letter-like symbols attempting to form phrases are released from a high point in the space, flowing downward like a waterfall to reach the ground. The linguistic signs that accumulate on the floor transform into an illegible, scattered sediment.

Words that appear to be carried along by the flow of water slip away from their roots; they become unable to refer to any subject or historical context. The elements of the story that have been filtered out and forgotten over time go astray, pouring in through the window and spreading throughout the space.

This site-specific installation becomes a multi-layered experience through its materials, sound, light, and darkness. I wanted the sound design accompanying the darkness and light and the fragmented words to follow a similar sense of interruption. Words are left incomplete; they repeat, they split. Whispers drowning in water, dissolving into the sound of wind do not form a linear sentence or tell a story. Instead, they move through the space like a presence that is sometimes unsettled, sometimes playful.

For the sound designs that accompany my works, I often collaborate with other artists and designers. The sound design for Ooze came together as follows: my dear theatre-maker Zinnure Türe performed the atonal poem created for the exhibition. Umut Gonca composed these voices, creating echoes and effects to shape them into a sound design.

https://wol.forumist.com/ooze.html

Ooze, 2026
Buşra Tunç
Site-specific installation
Aluminium, photoluminescent paint, UV light, sound
Voice performance: Zinnure Türe
Sound design: Umut Gonca