Blood on Silk: Trade is  a multi-screen video work.  Each of the three projections will show a different iteration of a set of actions performed by roughly the same group of participants at approximately the same time on three different days.  The work was shot in the hardware retail district of Beyoglu in Istanbul. The work is meditative, almost abstracted, shot from a single position down six floors to the street  below where three hardware shops are opening up for the morning’s  trade. The choreography of the street is revealed as each shop prepares their public face to trade.  That given moment of the day is entered into, observed and felt. Co-incidences of repeated actions are observed and noted.

The ambiguity of the relationship between the viewer and the participants is expressed by Orhan Pamuk in his memoir Istanbul, Memories and the City where he describes how, when his cousin (described as his aunt’s naughty son) opened the widow “… it was usually to spit on the roof of a car struggling up to the top of the alley, or throw a nail or firecracker he had skilfully attached to a string. Even today when I am at a high window that looks out onto a street I can’t help wondering how it would feel to spit down on passers-by.”

The project Blood on Silk addresses among other areas, the intersection between trade and blood. Istanbul is one of the many sites in the world where routes of trade intersect. Of interest here is that the historic silk route intersects with one of the new globalised routes for the trade in bio-products including blood and medical tourism.  Also traded through Istanbul are both legal and illegally obtained body parts and the associated blood products. In this work the instant of trade is an instance of vulnerability, of surveillance, of a pairing of the seemingly unrelated.