Single Channel video, 8:29 min, 2009
The video “Consumption Practices” reflects on the condition of the individual in a society that is mainly focused on consumerism where the single one is reduced to one role and becomes a the character of an advertisement campaign. Especially in places like the big shopping malls and anonymizing supermarkets that are emerging more and more, this becomes visible. As Jean Baudrillard stated, ‘The hypermarket is already, beyond the factory and traditional institutions of capital, the model of all future forms of controlled socialization: retotalization in a homogeneous space – time of all the dispersed functions of the body, and of social life (work, leisure, food, hygiene, transportation, media, culture); re-transcription of the contradictory fluxes in terms of integrated circuits; space .’
In the standardized space of the Profilo Shopping Center in Istanbul, which follows global norms with shops, restaurants and entertainment areas featuring the same as everywhere in the world, Nine different persons to interrupt their shopping with a kind of gymnastic exercise. In doing so the consumers resemble images and strategies from advertisement campaigns, more than that they create their own advertisements (turning into a “collective entreprise” to be able to impose its own image of society) in these spaces. By complementing advertisement’s melting position with the critical, thought provoking visuals of the exercises the video work aims to communicate this problem to the public.
