Hüseyin Işık or controlled chance

Four elements govern life: fire, rain, wind, and earth. Years later, I added to them.

I was born in the early 1960s in a small Kurdish village, though I don’t know exactly when.

My entire family soon emigrated to Istanbul. Before I started primary school, I drew my first picture on a wall—and earned my first slap for it. From that moment on, I began drawing everywhere, with anything I could get my hands on, and got myself into even more trouble.

In 1975, my first short story was published, followed a year later by my first caricature. I started working as a caricaturist for various newspapers. Turkey was in the midst of a civil war, culminating in the fascist military coup of 1980. Everything was forbidden—speaking, thinking, reading, walking in pairs… During that time, I began studying graphic design at the University of Applied Arts. As a caricaturist and illustrator, I worked for both major daily newspapers and banned magazines.

In 1984, I initiated a traveling exhibition against the death penalty, involving a group of caricaturists. The success of this exhibition, however, took another 16 years to materialize—when Turkey finally abolished the death penalty.

In 1988, I arrived in Vienna—a different world with different people and a different reality, a Balkanized Central Europe with Turkish coffee. I offered myself to the times, available for any purpose.

From the mid-1990s, I regularly exhibited on themes of identity, racism, and being a foreigner. I developed a love for public spaces—streets, alleys, squares, hospitals, universities, primary schools, theaters, subways, libraries, train stations, buses, construction sites… and for a different kind of storytelling. Discovering the city, bringing its dark sides to light, enjoying breakfast as art—during this time, everything was under my control, except for myself.

I was a policeman conducting ID checks, made sculptures explode with dynamite, snuffed out candles by depriving them of oxygen, erected border gates in open fields, destroyed paintings for poetic justice, auctioned off condemned human rights activists for their freedom, wrote chat programs without electricity or cables, using only paper and pen…

For the past ten years, I have been banned from entering Turkey because I forgot to complete my military service.

Now, I sit under my tree, brewing coffee for my neighbors…

The text above was whispered into my ear by my twin. I merely wrote it down.

H. Işık, Friedrichshof, 2009

• Studied at the University of Applied Arts, graduated from Marmara University of Fine Arts

• Worked as an illustrator, caricaturist, and cartoonist for various newspapers and magazines, and co-founded several print media outlets

• Numerous exhibitions, installations, actions, performances, and films in galleries, museums, art halls, and public spaces both domestically and internationally

• Participant in the 53rd Venice Biennale

• Conducts workshops and seminars on art and creativity

• Lives and works in Friedrichshof, Burgenland, since 2003