WHERE THERE IS SHADOW, THERE MUST BE LIGHT

"The light of truth is eternal"

Niyâzî-i Mısrî

"We are invisible even in brightly polished mirrors."

Neşâtî

It may be enlightening to start with the words of Abel Tiffauges, the protagonist of Michel Tournier's novel "The King of the Redwoods": "Everything is a sign. But it takes either a bright light or a shrill cry to pierce our myopia or deafness". Foucauldian genealogical research, which says that Truth is discursive and therefore historical, had brought us to a point where relative Truth changes from individual to individual, from society to society. The subsequent linguistic turn again showed that relative Truth depends on the infinite play of signs. And we have finally reached an age in which signs can be manipulated, a "post-truth" age, and we live on the brink of mistrust and dissolution of the concept of Truth, not only philosophically but also socially. Although the modernist project, which is not sewn together firmly and has weak quilting points, strives to be reborn in another form in the postmodernist incubator, it now lives in unrelated and uncorrelated signs that are more disorganised and scattered on the surface of the water. Today, in a game of meaning whose ultimate signifier has been obscured, or rather, whose sign has been erased, we can no longer speak of semiotic continents waiting to be discovered on the surface, but of non-Western traditions that have been explored more deeply. Thinkers and artists, who are committed to carrying not ashes but embers from the hearth of their ancestors, are today digging into their memories to see how they can extract that "bright light" from the ashes.
 

Re-envisioning
 

It seems possible to bring the "bright light" out of the ashes of tradition, first of all, by tearing down the walls of the Cartesian mental fortress, by reaching transcendence with the Intellect and the spirituality connected to it. When Wittgenstein was establishing his non-systemic philosophy, he wanted to say that it should not be established only with reason by saying "Philosophy should actually be created as poetry". Wittgenstein's main conclusion was in favour of this: "Language cannot comprehend everything that exists in the world." If language cannot comprehend everything that exists in the world and if it is necessary to keep silent about the unspeakable, that is, if it is incomplete to express Being and impossible to express God, then it is necessary to use intuition (imagination), which is the intellect's access to the unintelligible. Thus, it is necessary to realise that what is rational does not necessarily mean what is real, but that what is real can also be irrational, just as the Pythagoreans used Reductio ad absurdum when proving irrational numbers. In this sense, to establish philosophy as poetry means to make room for intuition (imagination) within it, for philosophy that cancels imagination will be condemned to the judicial hell, the conceptual prison of reason. When imagined, words, which are "the hardest of materials", soften, images, which are "the most uneasy of materials", become clearer, the conflict is resolved; "the new" emerges at the moment when the imagination is closest to capturing what has not yet been conceptualised. Therefore, the imagination must first dismantle and break down the walls of the incomplete fortress of the intellect, or in other words, the conceptual prison.
 

Signs and Orientation
 

In Islamic and Eastern art, light and shadow are not located on a peinture plane; they are located in the artist's imagination, which cannot be separated from his/her art. With its sense of being connected to an original ontology, it tries to rise towards the Absolute, towards the light, by passing through the relative, the 'shadow', by filtering the 'shadow'. In Hüsn ü Aşk (Beauty and Love) by Şeyh Gâlip, Love, which is on a journey in pursuit of absolute beauty, reaches Hüsn (Beauty) only after burning the castle of forms. The imagination, which has set its heart on getting rid of shadows and forms and reaching the light that is the source of shadow and form, finds the 'signs' offered by tradition ready at hand to set the palace of reason on fire and tear the web of signs. In this sense, we can say that the artist who feeds on tradition works not only at a level of signification that connects the signifier and the signified conjuncturally, but also at a level of signification that gives a vector to the "signified" and directs it towards the "transcendental signified".

Today, the reorientation of the artist, who wants to respond to his age by shaping his self in tradition, towards the "transcendent" gives him the ability to prompt his imagination and "start again". Sufi philosophy, which establishes the signification index of tradition, with its dionysiac aspect, gives him the opportunity to start again at any time and any place. Mevlana, who said "Let go of intellect and keep love", emphasised the all-encompassing nature of love against the intellect's attempt to understand everything; we will say that this feeling depends on starting from an a priori point in the encounter with existence. The autonomous will in the dionysiac is not initiated first and foremost by the intellect, but by the heart and love. Şeyh Gâlip describes this ability to always start again with the lines "Suddenly find love / This gift is for the one who finds it".

The attainment of the dionysiac state of mind through love depends on "waiver", that is, the renunciation of the relative predicates of existence; while the intellect tries to increase knowledge, the heart tries to decrease it; while the intellect fragments, the heart gathers; while the work of the intellect is accumulation, the work of the heart is subtraction. This subtraction process is for concentrating on the Truth. The imagination turns towards the Truth, the source of light, by refraining from the shadow existence. At this point, the Transcendent Being is not the subject of the intellect's enquiry; it is the subject of the heart's orientation; therefore, it is understood not by enquiry but by resembling it. To be like it is "to be" on absolute predicates and "not to be" on relative predicates. In the case of turning towards the Transcendent Being by getting rid of attributes and acquiring absolute predicates and becoming one with it (realisation), it is understood that Entity (Zat) is light and Being is shadow. Realisation (becoming-one-with-Truth), in other words the disappearance of the 'shadow' in the 'light', is compared to the disappearance of the image in the mirror. The light (Absolute Divine Light) manifests so strongly in the mirror (heart) which has been purified from rust and polished that the form resembling a 'shadow' can no longer be seen in the mirror due to the intensity of the light (Nûr). As Neşâtî says, "We rejected visibility so much that we became invisible even in brightly polished mirrors".
 

Light and Shadow
 

The dichotomy of light and shadow in Islamic art can be formulated as the relationship of Sun > Light > Shadow, considering the axis of Entity, Attributes and Being. In this thinking and perception, light and shadow are not conceived separately from each other: "Despite the blindness of the person who says, "The shadow is separate from the tree," Mevlana says, "I keep wandering in the shadow cast by your sun. When he says, "Everyone who takes shelter in the shade of a tree in the heat of a summer day talks about the shadow, the tree that casts the shadow, but no one talks about the sun that casts the shadow, the light of the sun", he states that Being, the shadow, is a veil to the Entity, the transcendent, and that the object that causes the shadow to form should not prevent turning towards the light. Therefore, the understanding at the core of traditional art sees light and shadow not in opposition to each other, but in a relationship that expresses balance and harmony.

It is possible to see a similar understanding in the tile ink paintings of the ancient Chinese civilisation. The concepts of emptiness and fullness at the core of these paintings transform each landscape painting into a "yin-yang" image in which light and shadow are in balance. Yin symbolises fullness, darkness and shadow, Yang symbolises emptiness, light and illumination. In the art of miniature, colours and motifs, which are the elements of ornamentation and decoration, provide fullness, while all forms, from human to animal, from cloud to tree, are depicted as shadows, far from realism. On the other hand, the shadow being in front of the real being is enveloped in a veneer of holiness in proportion to its belonging to its source. Colour represents light, and form represents shadow. Colour and form are the symbols of the manifested divine light diffused throughout existence.

As the shadow shows the light, water reflects the sun, and the drop echoes the deep, art, which turns towards the transcendent, devises symbols that provide access to the absolute from the relative Being it sees as a shadow. The use of the symbol in metaphysical thought allows the transcendent to be grasped inherently; when the symbol is reflected in metaphysical truth and metaphysical truth is "contemplated" through the symbol, the transcendent truth is no longer external to the self; the inherent merges with the transcendent directly through the symbol. For example, to give an example from Islamic metaphysics, Niyâzî-i Mısrî's expression "the light of truth is eternal" has a symbolism that combines the inherent with the transcendent. There is not only a literary analogy here, but also a metaphysical formula. If the thing that is being compared in this expression is considered as "the Light (Sun) of Truth" and the thing it is being compared to as "eternal moment", we see that the thing being compared is actually a simile in itself and that the Truth (the thing being compared) is compared to the Sun (the thing it is being compared to). Niyâzî-i Mısrî adds another layer to the Platonic good-sun analogy: The Truth, which is like the sun, is in the eternal present; therefore, the difference of the Truth from the sun in the sky is that it does not pass away, but is in a perpetual present. Here, when "now", which denotes external time, is transformed into "moment", which is the expression of internal time, Niyâzî-i Mısrî's formula expresses that the Truth is accessible at every moment that it is never lost. Niyâzî-i Mısrî adds the dimension of "time" (in fact, timelessness) to the contemplation of the Truth (Good) through the symbol of the sun, because the symbol itself is timeless.
 

Invitation to Inner Journey
 

In this framework, we have determined the theme of the 3rd Yeditepe Biennial as ‘Where There is Shadow, There must be Light’. We think that shadow and light, as metaphors and parts of reality, function as a key for human beings to make sense of themselves and existence. In this sense, we see the works of artists who rely on tradition, weaved with the "indexes of signification" of Islamic art and Eastern arts, as a reflection on shadow and light, as an inner journey towards the transcendent, towards the Light. The truth is hidden in the dance of light and shadow, in the harmonious coexistence of the Transcendent and the Relative, and this mystery appears as an inseparable pair in each work of art and its philosophical depth. We would like to discover together the journey of artists who comprehend traditional arts and become integrated with their art in the venues of the 3rd Yeditepe Biennial.

Ancient civilisations are of holistic nature. The art that emerged from these civilisations has the characteristic of developing a holistic view of Being, of implying the universal principles that act upon reality, and in this respect, traditional art is more open to imagination and negotiation than realistic art. Paul Klee, who was inspired by Islamic art and Eastern arts, recognised that art is not creation, but imitation of creation, and said: "I cannot be grasped in the here and now. For my dwelling place is as much among the dead as the yet unborn. Slightly closer to the heart of creation than usual. But not nearly close enough." Artists who imitate creating rather than creation, who try to understand and comprehend its rules, who stand "slightly closer to the heart of the creation" and "watch" its dance of light and shadow, will be able to lead us to the "language of becoming" as opposed to the "language of being", to the clarity of "or" as opposed to the certainty of "is".

Thinking of shadow and light places us directly at the centre of the question of Truth. The fact that the shadow changes its place according to the position of the light points to its relativity, and the fact that it disappears when there are no light points to its existence. If you say the shadow exists, it does not exist: if you say it does not exist, it does not exist. It came into existence later and will end after a while. The shadow disappears, the sun remains. The sun and light do not 'disappear'.