LIONS IN A CAGE - Tuğrul Pekgenç & Valeria Gypsette | TRÆVOL™ Gallery

LIONS IN A CAGE To spare someone’s life, yet rob them of a lifetime… We dedicate this work to Pentagram [Music Band] The impression “Lions in a Cage” left upon us led us into the secluded existence known in Ottoman history as the Kafes. Fratricide, practised in the Ottoman Empire to safeguard the throne, had also been enshrined in Mehmed the Conqueror’s code of law. Under the Kafes system, which became established in the seventeenth century, princes lived under strict surveillance in the palace quarters known as Şimşirlik sometimes for decades. Inside the palace. Outside of life. Beyond those walls lay the possibility of a throne; within them, a lifetime slowly dwindled away. They waited for the door to open, never knowing whether it would bring freedom or death. Men expected to govern a country grew up cut off from its life. We created this work to keep alive the historical anguish carried by a song. To reflect on the cost of survival, the fear that isolation cultivates within a person, and the wounds that power passes from one generation to the next. Becoming a sovereign could never restore the childhood left behind. Within the prince’s lion-shaped shadow lie the anger accumulated throughout a captive life and the power he has been denied. The chilling cycle through which someone who has spent years waiting in fear can eventually come to rule over the fate of others… On the wall, we inscribed the song’s words in Arabic: لمن هذه الأيدي؟ إنها تمتد إلى الداخل وتنتزع مني حياتي بيدي أنا… لكني أنا أيضًا قتلت إخوتي، عندما اضطررت إلى ذلك. لا شك لي. لا روح لي. لمن هذه الأيدي؟ من سلب النور؟ من له الحق؟ ومن يكترث أصلًا؟! ليكن «افعل ما تشاء» هو القانون كله! When the cage door opens, does the captivity within us end as well?