Necmi Sönmez: Dear Renée, these past years your works could be seen in important group exhibitions such as "Malerei als Erinnerung” (Aarau, Beat Wismer) and "Painting on the Move” (Basel, Bernhard M. Bürgi). It was noticeable that alongside works on cardboard, plaster, aluminum panels, canvas, or MDF boards, fluorescent paint was sprayed directly onto the wall, while in this exhibit in Museum Folkwang you have used plastic film for the first time as a support. How does your choice of support influence how we perceive your painting?
Renée Levi: Spraying can be done on any surface. In the Folkwang I considered the matt gray wallpaper already there as a picture support. I covered this wallpaper with a vividly white film sprayed yellow beforehand. This film runs along the walls like a shiny second skin and in the reflected light shows the nature of the exhibition walls, the structure of the wallpaper. The sprayed drawings, however, appear as projections and aren’t troubled by the irregularities in the walls. The film between wallpaper and drawing makes two surfaces manifest, that of the exhibition walls and that of the drawing.
I am on the lookout for a quality of ambivalence that can’t be negated but can be recharged again and again. Spraying increases this phenomenon of an inability to grasp or hold fast, because the cloud of spray obscures the edges of the line, its contours. In addition: by means of the yellow application, the white film appears violet.

N S: Color determines our perception of space. On the one hand, because of the precise use of color, a transformed as well as a transforming space comes about in which something different happens, as if other energies cluster there, i.e., an in-between space arises. On the other hand, space is functional; it is used by people who are going about their job (Eyes in the main hall of UBS Basel): spatial movements of coming and going, giving and taking.
You studied architecture. I believe that an engagement with this subject has given you a direct understanding of people’s spatial needs. Could we comprehend the architectural in your work that is shown in the installations, wall projects and temporary interventions as an artistic strategy?
R L: I do not follow any strategy. I am not interested in architecture in itself, and if I am, then it is in the urban complex as a whole. The thing at issue in my works is not an inquiry into architecture and the way it is handled, but setting signs that allow a dialogue to arise between picture and viewer, that orient them and give them a framework to move in.
This means constantly rejuvenating ways of dealing with the specific situation. Also the individual museum is a particular place; it is concept, definition, concrete space, and each museum is an embodiment of its own history. The 40 cm high ventilation grates that mark the exhibition room in the Folkwang Museum form a base that massively affects the presence of the wall as an exhibit wall. Or the entrance situation with the diagonal access to the exhibition room, which offers you no hold as you walk off into indistinctness. I had to get involved with this room, but want to define it in a new way and want to make the viewer moving through it experience it. With the setup of two additional walls, I want to (re)place the situation. As a visual artist I am sculptor, drawer and painter and consequently – also in the role of architect – want to optimize the exhibition room to meet my own purpose and be able to compose my intentions visually and make them concrete.

N S: When and for what reason did you begin to name your works after city districts in Istanbul? Is this a result of an intense occupation with the emotional life that shapes the city?
R L: I used such a title for the first time in the installation at mamco (musée d’art moderne et contemporain) in Geneva. I worked on the installation in situ in the entrance hall of the museum and at times overheard the French or other foreign speech fragments of the passers-by. Memories I have of my relatives in Istanbul surfaced; they talk a mixture of languages: Ladino, French, Turkish jumbled together. I called the one room of the installation Pera, which refers to the formerly Jewish quarter in Istanbul. Pera is also the place I was born and thus marks, as it were, a double starting point.
Not until my immediate family had moved to Switzerland did I realize from that distance how much languages had shaped my picture of Istanbul. The memories of Istanbul together with the direct experience of my new surroundings led to an inner and outer chaos that I liked very much. It was very formative and I still today feel at home in this chaos. The sound of a language, the sound of a voice, the melody of a dialect can transplant me to other worlds. Each new dialect creates a new identity. I love this feeling of thinking and feeling in different languages. It is a prerequisite to letting yourself in for strange or new worlds, acoustically and visually.

N S: You were four when you came to Switzerland with your parents and your brother from Istanbul. Do your childhood memories play a great role in your works? I am thinking here especially of Pera or Galata, which refer to the urban (life)flow as well as its specific geographic constellation at the threshold to different cultures between orient and occident. The intense color application seems to reflect the rhythm of the city.
R L: Titles are mostly chosen after the work is finished. I view them more as a game of irritation than as an explanation. In fact the many light, round tangles in the work in the Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Basel did indeed also recall the veils of white smog over the Galata Bridge in Istanbul. Otherwise I rarely remember the process of making anything. The where, how and when of a work process resembles more a black hole, a space without language or image, and that’s good.
My titles are questions that are also directed at myself. Where do I come from? Why am I making these squiggles and dots and lines? I appreciate the differentness of titles that encompass questions.

N S: Up to now you have only allowed the European part of the city to flow into your titles. With your work Sar|yer, which you have done specially for the Museum Folkwang, you approach the Bosporus in language and geography. In my opinion a different life style reigns there, since the tranquil current of the Bosporus influences people’s lives. What does this mean in respect to how your work is perceived?
R L: Unfortunately I know Istanbul too little to be able to talk of the water currents of the Bosporus. Translated from the Turkish, Sar|yer means "yellow place”. Sar|yer as a place name bothered me. In my works the specific reference to a specific color at a specific place is a recurring way of dealing with different situations. The work is not called "Sar|yer” because I wanted to work with yellow but because I want to thematize the perception of a place. A title gives a formerly nameless and wordless experience a name. Naming makes understanding per se the issue, which I undermine or make the very theme, because the name says something, names what is there and yet is really only present as idea and experience.

N S: The picture (of) Istanbul triggers a multi-language perception in you. What do you mean by that?
R L: While spraying, I try to forget spraying, paint, time and myself. I would like to vanish from my shell. There is a gap, a difference between doing and thinking and talking about a picture. We can try with words to come closer to the heart of the matter; we are even forced to have a verbal dialogue in order to be able to pursue and retrace something. But I don’t trust language and am always dissatisfied with my verbal efforts. German is the language I have the best command of, and yet I still have the feeling that I don’t possess my own language. I always feel myself speaking as a foreigner, not only in life, but at times also in the art system.
My name is a first definitive language. It is behind this name that I stand; but others also stand and stood. Names identify and they make identification proposals. My name founds my identity. With it I inherit family, cultural identity, pressure and responsibility, but also power. This name is set down like a sign. We should all be able to read our names like signs, like fleeting graffiti.



From the German by Jeanne Haunschild


Catalog:
Renée Levi. Kill me afterwards
Verlag für moderne Kunst Nürnberg
Museum Folkwang Essen
2003