Jhad, oil paint and acrylic on canvas, 140x240cm, 2015   

The Empowering Costume, Polyester, Collaboration with Fashion Brand Sadak, 2015

JHAD Loves a Prologue Too

That postmodern irony embodied in superheroes has been mostly responded by an anarchist humor in German modern culture. To trace it back to cartoons, comics and political satire, the weekly Simplicissimus published between 1896 and 1967, with a hiatus from 1944-1954, is a highlight with contributions by Hermann Hesse, Gustav Meyrink, Fanny zu Reventlow, Frank Wedekind, Alfred Kubin, Otto Nückel, Robert Walser, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Heinrich Mann and Erich Kästner. The Simplicissimus caricatures mainly addressed Prussian military figures, and rigid German social and class distinctions. Comic books were not published in Nazi Germany because such literature was banned under the "Smut and Trash" decree. And the post World War II comic sphere is shaped by translations like Tintin, Asterix and Marvel characters even though there were figures, with critical attitudes towards superheros, like private detective Nick Knatterton in the 1950s or Werner in the 1980s. The Marvel database has a long listing of its Germans characters and some of the popular figures such as Max Eisenhardt, also known as Magneto, is an outcome of many atrocities of The World War II that transformed his youth.

The superhero character JHAD appearing in the context of Berlin is not a coincidental proposal and should be read with such a critical cultural background. JHAD shares the body of the artist Hasan. In his painterly work, Hasan has re-thought about the icons - religious superheros- and their interrelations within personalized narratives and through cross-cultural hues. Today's anti-Islamic turn, its constructed mythologies, the globalized 'Other' and the consequentially re-orientalized bodies of desire have formed his thinking space for a while. Though he resists to label his work as queer art or use 'queerness' as his sole symbolic capital, his work desires a new form of politicization in queer perspective and looks for different means to make such a new form possible.

Superheros are agents for shifting imbalances of power structures with a moral urgency. JHAD, on the other hand, carries a Foucauldian agency that looks for different tools to transform the self and redefine the limits of the physical body and its pleasures. His name may provoke and has many colloquial references too. He is a Berliner phantom; he has a fashionable glam taste, he loves to appear, disappear and re-appear in the dark corners of places where erratic bodies find comfort and pleasure. He wants to operate with that absurd humor Germans use to respond to superheros and to play for a shift of taste in that respect. He has his personal and phantomatic reasons in his desire to be more than visible only towards Germans. And he wants to be popular just like any other superheros secretly do.

As they share the same body, when JHAD is there Hasan isn't and when Hasan is there JHAD disappears. At the moment we can only imagine and speculate on how the particular body that hosts both Hasan and JHAD will be transformed in this process and how two embodied characters will affect each other, what kind of traces their future adventures will leave for each other. This is a brief textual introduction for the curious as among many things mentioned above JHAD loves a prologue too.

Övül Durmuşoğlu 2015 

A Superhero Jhad at GSL Projekt

The eye is the organ of vision. According to some superstitious beliefs it is also a metaphor for jealousy. The eye is the gaze; the male gaze, the gaze of the museum, gallery visitor or, the orientalist. In the last scene of George Bataille's pornographic novel Story of The Eye, the fetching protagonist Simone carves out the eyes of the priest. The anti-clitoris-doctor Freud links the fear of losing the eye to the fear of castration - this makes sense considering the act of Simone. The radical protagonist - I see her as a queer-feminist - not only destroys the eye, but also the gaze of the power that is generated through the body of the priest.

The neo-orientalist/imperialist gaze upon the body of the artist Hasan Aksaygın is presented through the cave of his superhero alterego Jhad. As a result of Aksaygin's unfortunate experience under the gaze of a neo-nazi student and the subsequent apathy of the largely white school where he studied, Jhad came into being. I know Hasan, but never met Jhad. I saw a painting of him. Like most superheroes, he has a strong body that induces desire. I/we encountered the traces of Jhad at GSL Projekt between May 22nd and 29th.

The meaning of the word jihad is to resist or struggle. What Jhad does is not struggling at all. The superhero accepts the situation. Rather than carving the eyes out, the artist Hasan Aksaygin mocks the neo-orientalist gaze and mirrors it back. Playing with the connotations of the word jihad, Jhad's understanding of hetero-normative notions such as nation and religion is different than what we would imagine through the sheer reception of his name. Jhad is not angry, on the contrary he is thankful to the ones who created him by othering Hasan. As the other, he reinforces the ideas and existence of his creators and and gives back to them what they desire.

"I am Jhad. I am the defender and protector of German society's existence as I embody the integral and inseparable Other. I was created for this mission by German homosexuals and marvellous sexual powers were bestowed upon me. Hasan and I cohabit the same physical body; him as an artist and I as a Jihadist."

In front of an art nouveau motif, Jhad mimics the hand gesture of Jesus in his stylish outfit. Reminiscent of women in the history of art, arranged as the object of desire without a gaze, Jhad has no eyes at all. His eyeballs are turned, we only see the whites of them: did he ever have pupils, or color in his eyes at all? Since he doesn't have eyes, you would never know if he even considers your existence or not. In Aksaygin's painting there are several temporalities appearing on one plain surface or in a space. The non-existing look, the background and the hand gesture in such a contemporary outfit creates this uncanny timelessness. Jhad does not belong to any time we know.

On the contrary to what one would imagine, Jhad is not a fighter superhero. His life is unpredictable: we don't know and cannot even guess when Jhad will appear. His costume, as a trace of him, was hung at the opening, while Hasan was flirting − a drink in one hand − with the spectators in the space of GSL. A book covered with the same pattern as Jhad's costume was standing on a pedestal. The book was Arabian Sands written by Wilfred Thesiger about his travels in the Arab Peninsula in the 1950s. Besides his travels to these 'othered' lands, the 20th century orientalist traveller talks about Arab boys, the "love of his life". Reminiscent of 1790s bibliomania, not only the lands but also the boys became the white traveller's object of desire.

In a time where the notions of past, present, and future are blurred, Jhad appears. He embodies the religious gestures and spaces of modernity, names himself with other religious symbols and by this way deconstructs their values or symbolic overtones. In a queer-hybrid time that is difficult to pinpoint, the superhero/artist criticizes the notion of desire generated by hetero-normativity as well homo-normativity.

Göksu Kunak, 2015

https://www.berlinartlink.com/2015/06/10/artfeminism-hasan-aksaygin-a-queer-jhad-at-gsl-projekt/