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How to tell of peace to a living dove? Still from Şener Özmen’s 2015 video How to tell of peace to a living dove?, featured in his solo exhibition “There is a Way Out” at PİLOT, İstanbul (September 1 - October 10, 2015). Courtesy the artist and PİLOT, Istanbul.

Fall 2015 | ArteZine

How to tell of peace to a living dove?

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Şener Özmen, How to tell of peace to a living dove?, 2015, HD video, 04’32”. Courtesy the artist and PİLOT, Istanbul.

Frankly, dear little dove, you and I should have met well before our unrecognized lives turned into hell, not now!

Not restrained by the evil frame of this video, in slight showers every now and then, in the sunshine afterwards, when rainbows appeared among the flocks of white clouds like your feathers, without the war evoking the peace and the peace evoking the war.

Not now, not here!

Good things could happen even here, dear white dove, and they do occasionally happen, disperse very soon though, just like art, ether, and childhood. Like my own childhood that won’t reintegrate…

How can I tell you about something I don’t know, haven’t seen or experienced?

Beside that you mean nothing to me but a symbol, you don’t even fulfil your mission assigned by us idiots!

I have seen people who somersault in the air for PEACE, just like this, we stumble and break our necks, somersaulting!

Must feed peace…

Still, I envy you, as you don’t have a lingual-identity problem that blown away your species, you never did; you don’t take up sectarian warfare..

I’m aware that I’ve been unfair to you, keeping you busy like this.

I will set you free dear white, desperate dove. Not politically.

For we are unable talk about peace in a land like this, full of doves.

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