Turkish artist explores link between art and corporate culture in Shoreditch exhibition

Flexible approach: A still from Burak Delier’s Crisis of Control

“I saw this ad on the tube the other day, it said: ‘Tired of being tired’,” explains the Turkish artist Burak Delier. He leans back into his chair, throws open his arms and repeats the tagline like a magical incantation and laughs.

Delier is describing his work Crisis and Control (2013), a video of white-collar workers from the world of corporate finance talking about the different methods they use to relieve stress, contorted into a series of physically exacting yoga positions.

It’s funny and absurd, dark and twisted (literally), a perversely contrived performance of what Delier describes as the “imposed neoliberal ethos of being”, a being caught in an existentialist no man’s land between duty and distraction.

The uneasy relationship between corporate culture and artistic practice is foregrounded in Collector’s Wish (2012). Here Delier submitted his artistic agency to the will of well-known Turkish art collector Saruhan Doğan, offering to create an artwork determined entirely by his patron’s instruction.

The result is a vast red painted wall, what Doğan explains is actually about a story told to him by his grandfather derived from a poem about a newly wealthy man wanting to decorate his villa – a critique of the bad taste of the nouveau riche.

“The artist as an autonomous creative force is a myth. For example, when a writer gives an interview about his or her big successful book, they don’t say, well the editor changed the ending and the narrative structure and this and this,” Delier says.

“Different players all add to the work in some way. In Collector’s Wish I’m performing a role for the patron, but really I am the one who sets the stage for this to happen.”

Freedom Has No Script is the title of Delier’s first UK show, an exhibition encompassing Collector’s Wish, Crisis and Control and a newly commissioned work Songs of the Possessed at Iniva (Institute of International Visual Arts) in Shoreditch.

The title, he says, was inspired by the anarchic sense of freedom borne out of last year’s protest movement around Taksim Gezi Park in Istanbul, the megacity where the artist lives and works.

“I think there’s a certain shared understanding or common sense, if you like, not articulated, that the rule of law doesn’t mean justice,” Delier says.

Suspicious of his position as an artist caught in the loop between radical practice and market forces and his inability to affect real change, Delier has reached the conclusion not to “sell” his activism.

“I’m not saying I come at this from a clean and innocent position – it’s more about using the available tactics,” he explains. “Really what Gezi was about was proposing something new and the memory of Gezi lives on in this new vocabulary of how we relate to other people.

“If we don’t take the risk, if we worry about complicity, then we lose the potential in the present, then we lose today. I am saying we should take the risk.”

Burak Delier: Freedom Has No Script is at Iniva, 1 Rivington Place, EC2A 3BA until 17 May.