Texts about the artist and his works:

It's not just paint on canvas.
To the newer pictures of Ibrahim Coskun

The pictures of Ibrahim Coskun have a strong pull effect. Already at the first meeting with them we are captured by the intensity of their expression. This painting is expressive, but at the same time it is abstract, but without being distant from content. We encounter a remarkable painterly quality that is beyond the ordinary, increasing from image to image.
Ibrahim Coskun calls his works, created in the past two years, "earthly images." We do not see earth in the literal sense in the paintings, but we soon realize that much has to do with the earth, it is the native soil of the artist, It is rough, it is whirled up in the medium of color, but it exists as a fact, as a motive for the painter.This earth shows no harmonious tuned landscape, no perfect world, in which the artist may look back Everything seems restless, uncomfortable and disturbing from the inside in. The viewer 's gaze follows a brushstroke as well as the ductwork of the spatula and tries to find its way into the content, the character of what is offered here.The color designates concrete things like houses or fragments of Landscape as well as abstract structures, the color expresses itself powerfully in these works, one would almost be inclined to say that it belongs to the artist We are aiming for a revival of abstract-informal structures that we know best from the paintings of the 50s and 60s. But if this interpretation were one-sided, it would lead us on the wrong track, would not properly appreciate the intention and intuition of the artist. Ibrahim Coskun's paintings have a substance that has its origins in its Kurdish origin as well as bitter political experiences in Turkey that exists in reality. It is known that Tunceli Province, located in Central Anatolia and majority Kurdish, was subjected to military operations in the 1990s. Even Ibrahim Coskun has not been spared from these political conditions. The fact that more than half of his previously created paintings have been destroyed only reflects the purely material side of this fate.
The agitation described above in the pictures themselves is therefore not purely aesthetic. It characterizes the inner world of the painter, who was sometimes exposed to traumatic events. His development towards an expressive painting is therefore not random, rather it is a logical consequence. The decision to speak this way and not otherwise demands all respect from us.
A painterly phenomenon determines almost all the pictures in this series: it is the dialectics of proximity and distance. Ibrahim Coskun shows things like rows of houses, on the one hand, very concretely, almost within grasp, namely on the very front of the picture. On the other hand, a mental assumption of the motive seems completely impossible. Things are aloof, very distant from the viewer's point of view. The houses seem eerily lost in a kind of nightmare world. And vice versa, the same thing: what seems remote is closer than initially assumed. This painterly strategy, this permanent shifting of closeness and distance, is part of Ibrahim Coskun's pictorial aesthetics, while remaining true to pure aesthetics. The world of the senses, the things that can be experienced with the eyes, seem to escape the painter at a certain moment; holding on seems impossible, perhaps even unwilling.
This observation is supported by the fact that in none of the works - not even in the implied way - do humans emerge. The earth, the houses, the landscape are abandoned, in the figurative sense only the color exists. The color determines the mood of the painter, with an exclusiveness that is overwhelming. And the color whips, especially in those works in which the abstraction is particularly advanced. Red, blue, yellow, green and white mix here to create a dense color world that does not allow the painter - and the viewer - to escape. The color whirls up its inner being, it flashes and thunders alike, and literally every spot is part of a flood of color.
In the works in which red dominates, the thought of an inferno is close. When blue spreads its enormous weight, one has the impression that a large flood of water makes this world of images uninhabitable. Even if muted colors are in the foreground, one does not mean that harmonious worlds are laid out in front of us. Often the works of pink-yellow-white tones have the feeling that the visible world has literally been swept away - a very personal view of the painter's inner and outer events.
It's not just paint on the canvas. Color means existence for Ibrahim Coskun. These "earth pictures" are entirely mood pictures. They have a stirring aesthetic, are terribly beautiful. Anyone who likes to follow the pure color aesthetic will be absorbed by it - this is part of the identity of these paintings. Those who are emotionally affected by the radical nature of these works have discovered another dimension.
Demand the pictures of Ibrahim Coskun. They let neither our feeling nor our conscience just pass by.

Tayfun Belgin

Tayfun Belgin, born in 1956 in Zonguldak / Turkey, is director of the Osthaus Museum Hagen.

"No, art has never existed there."

"No, art has never existed there," he says of the village in eastern Anatolia, where he grew up. But what's worse is that there are hardly any lives left. "The place is half extinct, with the exception of the old ones, they are almost all gone."
It has been almost thirty years since Ibrahim Coskun left his dersimer home and went to Germany as a 'guest worker'; almost ten years since he visited his village for the last time, to call home only means memory and mourning for a lost good. In his innermost life it lives on and articulates itself in the pictures of the artist who has long since become a Bielefeld artist.
When he says, "I'm painting my home," it's not meant to be easy to understand. Homeland here is not a concrete, externally identifiable location, not the subject of striking representations in enlightenment or accusatory intent; Coskun has gradually stepped away from that. It means rather an inner understanding, means homeland, how he has them - even in all turmoil - in itself, how he feels them, works off on her to (over) live in the remaining homelessness. This is what he symbolically seeks to 'describe' in the language of abstract-expressionist painting of our time. Only then did he find the freedom to adequately articulate himself.
Seen in this way, it is images of home as a place of his soul - "messages of my innermost," as he says himself. As much as he is motivated and influenced by his concrete biography, his identity as Dersimer, his experience of persecution and exile, Ibrahim Coskun wants to know it in a general, a deliberately generalized sense: If his art stands for something, then for existential feeling a man marked by roots and alienation alike. It is a position of artistic autonomy in a political context. Ibrahim Coskun worked his way through it gradually, having felt the limits to which he had come up with politically-striking art - a claim he had taken for granted for a long time: the boundaries set by evolving artistic articulation needs. As an artist, he no longer wants to serve one thing, but to 'serve' himself. This is not a departure from the cause, but a gain in personal freedom, without which is worthwhile for any political concern.
Ibrahim Coskun accepts the disappointment of expectations that are often categorically asserted against him, the dersimer artist. "Compatriots are far too abstract," he says. they want to recognize or find something concrete in the pictures - especially with "one of us", from whom they want a visible partisanship. But even in his German environment he has met with incomprehension: "Why does he, who is a Dersimer, paint something like many others in the world? Where is the special about him?"
This does not only refer to that social 'alienation process', as it concerns basically all modern art, which defies the standardization pressure of conventional patterns of representation and perception with its own, autonomous imagery. With Ibrahim Coskun it is also the status as persecuted and forced to emigrate Dersimer, under which he is often seen only. It manifests - even subliminally - in the attribution of characteristics that one wants to see in him, from a supposedly proper role that he also has to play as an artist. That's why he sometimes gets asked questions that would never be posed to a German-born artist; No one should insist that any piece of Germany or German should be thematized in his painting.
It is therefore two tendencies towards functionalization that Ibrahim Coskun has to fight off. He does it almost uncompromisingly, following only his intuition, his restless urge to let out inner images, feelings, moods and to give them forms and colors. "Sometimes I explode when I'm standing in front of the screen," he says, adding, "If I could not do that, I'd get sick."
The silence and order radiating from his studio may not seem to fit at first glance. It is a certain seclusion that Coskun has chosen, perhaps needs - but sometimes also one that impose the circumstances on him. He does not feel so at home in any art scene - neither in the Dersimerr Artists 'Association nor in any of the local artists' associations. Even if he finds buyers now and then for his often large-format pictures, he does not seem to mind - despite all material dependence. It could be, he says doubtfully, "that they are interested in something quite different from what interests me, rather than my motives, my history, my homeland". Then, with a shrug of his shoulders, I can admit that one can not avoid it if one lives off the free market, which is also the "free market of interpretations."
It is without alternative and therefore a laborious 'business' to place oneself as a freelance artist. Home will find Ibrahim Coskun only in and with itself.

Niko Ewers

Niko Ewers is a journalist. He works as an editor of the "StadtBlatt" in Bielefeld and is a member of the culture committee OWL.

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Tayfun Belgin writes in the Ibrahim Coskun catalog "Fossilized Songs"

Fossilized Songs
The artist Ibrahim Coskun

It has been Friedrich Nietzsche, who said aboutthe visible: “We have art in order not to die of the truth” (Nachgelassene Fragmente, 1887-1889). This significant philosopher conceived reality as something ugly. For himself he intended an aesthetic transvalation of the apparently real: a transvalation in art. This acquisition of reality might, grosso modo, also be applicable to Ibrahim Coskun, who was born in the Turkish province Dersim (former Tunceli). His experiences, especially these he made in the country of his birth, nobody of us would like to undergo. And their weight pertains not only to Coskun, but as well to his relatives and friends. Similar to Nietzsche art brought a catharsis for him.
From a specific point on painting has become the primary route of his biography – until today.

Coskun’s artworks from the last decade that are printed in this catalogue testify a specific aesthetic transvalation of the visible.
These works usher into a world that is characterized by its barren landscape and its architectonic fragments, and that fascinated Coskun from the very beginning.
He encounters this hardly romantic landscape with a very attentive eye and, in doing so, he takes a look into the heart of this world and its history.

Anatolia knows very different cultures from the Hattians around 2000 BC, via the later Hittites, Urartarians, Greeks, Armenians, and Persians, through to the Seljuk-Turks and Kurds.
All of them have been influencing the land for millennia. Because of this the consideration of the history of Anatolia not only is interesting for Prehistorians, but also for the people, who want to learn something about the cultural heritage of this region. The art of Ibrahim Coskun would be hard to imagine without this cultural landscape, even if he is working 3000km away in his atelier in Berlin. His journeys through the province Dersim and Anatolia are annual working residences that have nothing to do with usual holidays.

On his journeys Coskun undergoes the ancient and time-transcending history of this landscape that he experiences as a part of himself from childhood on.
Later in his atelier these intense feelings and experiences emerge up on canvas again. Coskun’s intuition carries him throughout the time.

For hundreds of years Dersim and the Dersim population has been a thorn in the flesh of the Ottoman Empire and later of the Turkish Republic. In 1514 the Battle of Chaldiran between Ottoman Empire and Persia began. After the Ottomen’s victory the Dersim population was the only one that refused to relinquish its identity. In result ten thousands of Dersim people were massacred because of their faith. Since this time the policy of extermination against the Dersim people has been continuing, even after the Turkish Republic was established and equality was guaranteed for all minorities.

In 1937/38 Seyyid Riza was a leader of a tribe in the Dersim region. As a consequence of his refusal of the attempts at turkezation thousands of people have been murdered by air-strikes and other violent manners of suppression. According to official announcements during the airstrikes, the bombardments, and the subsequent executions in 1937 and 1938 more than 10000 Dersim people died. Other sources mention ten thousand deads. Nearly the same number of people has been deported to western Turkey.
The misery of those who remained in hunger and disease is indescribable. After these incidents the province was given the Turkish name Tunceli (Tunc = bronze, eli = hand).

During the 1980s, especially, after the new constitution had been implemented that followed the safety thinking of the military, a civil war enkindled in eastern Turkey.
The Turkish military and government made a bitter war on the PKK and the Turkish left-wing radicals that brought ten thousands of people into death on all sides, first of all in civil population. The result was a politic of burned ground; great resettlements followed. Relicts of human life, ruined towns, and broken souls remained behind.
We can never forget these events – just as little the historical massacre which we can talk about in public, today. Now, we can see Tunceli as if it were Dersim. And there are many Dersim people who do not leave the suffered sorrow of their ancestors in the past. Instead, they become active and call attention to it.

The artworks of Ibrahim Coskun claim both their historical and their contemporary context. They are no documents about this and that event. The painter uses his aesthetical knowhow to acquire a consciousness of the relation between the places of his past that now constitute his present life. Out of the art-historical view we can define diverse categories and pictorial motives: next to architectural elements that mostly show antique ruins or relicts of architectural ensembles seen through a misty shroud we explore works that intensively attend to the once preferred building material in this region: stones. These pictures appear as big lithic figures that lost their language and watch the beholder. It seems as if they are fossilized utterances. For us it is a small emotional step to feel a historical cosmos in these stone pictures that refers to a long sorrowful Anatolian life.
This is a Blues that continues even today, in the language, in the music, and in every day’s life.

Coskun is a fighter of colors. He developed all his expressive figurative works within an emotional and cognitive process. The artworks presented in this catalog reveal an emotional dimension that is looking for its kind. The painter prefers the colors red, blue, yellow, and white, sometimes supplemented by green and ocher hues. The three named basic colors constitutea pictorial world that is definable as both abstract and expressive. Coskun also creates works that are not directly related to an object or motive. His colors are able to reveal an emotional brokenness as well. In the way Ibrahim Coskun chooses his colors and brings them in pastos interaction on the canvas he creates worlds that are not known within the western contemporary arts. These pictures have a biographic matrix and are the essence of an inner world gradually moving outwards.

Several of his subjects are able to show this. In the architectonic pictures stones and doors seem to hinder the beholder to look into their inner. They give no chance to enter and the world of emotions cloisters itself. Often ancient remains from the past are cited. They relate to the wealthy settlement history of Anatolia that has been mentioned above.
Next to Greek temple fragments – sometime you can even see an acropolis – there are fragments of the Armenian past. Behind the haze resting on the canvas castle ruins come into view. Here a manifold world appears, but the painterly creation of distance preserves its impermeability. For centuries the inhabitants of the surrounding villages have been building and decorating their houses with antique material. They played an active part in the history shaping her in their own way.

One of the childhood experiences of Ibrahim Coskun was to play among the ruins of houses that have been hewn in the rocks, similar to those you can find in Kappadocia.
Also in his days in the Dersim region Armenian Christs were hiding from the attacks of other religious communities that had settled down in Anatolia. When he was a child, Coskun gladly imagined, how the life of these people housing among rocks could have been. His fantasy is able to take him away on journeys to the past and his works are witnesses of such experiences.

There is no question that landscapes are an absolute strength of Ibrahim Coskun’s work. They always are landscapes of emotions, relating to both the soil and the memory.
That we often can find deep fractures in the landscapes draws attention to the fact that the scenic subjects facing us in this art are no romantic ones. Landscape means homeland, but it also captures the emotional lesion caused by the military operations. Many humans came back to their former homeland after decades and found an infested environment.
This means that Ibrahim Coskun is not only talking for himself, when he transforms these barren landscapes with their remains of war into an aesthetically challenging world.
On the contrary, his painted worlds reflect the experiences of many others.

For me the paintings marked by an X constitute a new and different section of Coskun’s work. The huge X motive obviously has a symbolic implication. An X might stand for a liquidation ‒ in every day’s life maybe in terms of a harmless act, when we use an X to mark a completed text. In the mentioned pictures the X works as a metacharacter. Emphasizing its power the X covers a rock face. Definitely it is a symbol of liquidation. The rocks on which these characters have been set by Ibrahim Coskun block the view, maybe, because something terrible had taken place in their background. In picture 140 there is a windmill-like X on a hill. It seems as if there are people swathed in linen, maybe dead, who lie under a pylon that carries the X. Letters on this picture let us know: “Do not kill these people, do not let them go down.” In the light of the fact that the houses of those who should have been murdered were marked by Xes, the characters in Coskun’s paintings become symbols of the inability of those who had intended to eradicate the inhabitants of this region.

Indeed, for Ibrahim Coskun humans are a seldom topic, but his pictures with human figures are deeply moving.

An astonishing artwork, for example, shows three people sitting on a rock and looking at a tree that is, like them, immersed in white. These people seem to form a community of fate and the impression evolves that the U-shaped portal transfers them into a spiritual world that welcomes them. In some Anatolian areas and in Dersim too, a specific kind of shamanic culture keeps on living. Among the Hittites nature in general and sun and water in particular had a big spiritual importance. They decorated their close to water growing “whish trees” with pure white cloths that have been enriched with their hope and their requests. This might be another manifestation of the connection between these people.

Picture 332 is comparable with the above mentioned one. A tree and rocks dominate the scene in its macrostructure, where a group of people is moving from the left to the right.
Obviously the tree on the right separates the two groups that are walking to each other peacefully. This scenery appears biblical. Fruits give the tree a wonderful colored  decoration. With no doubt the movement and gestures of these humans are full of peace.

A very different picture is 344, where we meet a sleeping woman in the upper third. This is an artwork that was painted in memory of the story of the Armenian “Yellow Bride” ‒ the suffering of a woman living in a no longer inhabited region. She is covered with a blanket. Under her we see a deserted village of white houses resting in the scope of a hill.
This young woman is dreaming with a gently face. Her fine appearance traditionally symbolizes the Mother Earth of Anatolia. But what would be the end of her dream? Against the background of the artworks that Coskun has drawn the answer seems clear. In picture 347 we can find a Rodin motive. A group of women stands there in front of their children and tries to protect them. It seems as if danger is approaching. These children will be deported and the families will be split up ‒ that is the message. With its churning yellow background and the yellow-green and blue figures the work brings to life the horror of 1915. The X on the right side of the group gives good reason not to expect a positive conclusion.

Often the artworks of Ibrahim Coskun are hermetic. The painter expects that people intensively engage in the interpretation and understanding of his artworks. This is why you not easily can turn your back on these pictures. They are valuable aesthetic worlds that give a voice to all those who are suppressed.

Tayfun Belgin