WOLFPATH.EXE
digital video (1920 x 1080), color, sound, 4’ 04”, 2017, Turkey
Created by Kadir Kayserilioğlu
Updating a traditional origin myth through video game aesthetics, Wolfpath.exe is a meta-commentary on contemporary Turkey from the perspective of a young artist engaging with technology, popular culture, politics, and folklore. By directly confronting with the technical and ideological constraints of Far Cry 5, a popular video game developed by French giant Ubisoft and a “paradigmatic example of the politics of videogames in the face of an ongoing “anti-progressive/anti-feminist backlash” in the United States” — as Sören Schoppmeier convincingly argues in his essay “Playing to Make America Great Again: Far Cry 5 and the Politics of Videogames in the Age of Trumpism” — Wolfpath.exe forces the viewer to rethink the impact of game culture on the collective imaginary.
Born in 1987 in Istanbul, Kadir Kayserilioğlu received a B.A. in Graphic Design and an M.A. in Fine Arts from Yeditepe. He is currently pursuing a Doctorate program at Marmara University, while making and exhibiting art in Turkey and elsewhere. His practice is grounded in the idea that play operates across a wide range of forms including video games and collaborative, performance-based video and imagery. His works often rely on a combination of instructions and protocols on one hand, and collective improvisational processes and chance operations on the other. This often results in works that challenge conventional notions of authorship and authority, imbued with a dark humoristic style, showing irreverence towards traditional hierarchies between forms of high and popular culture, assembling high production value with home made and DIY esthetics. His areas of investigation include the nature of social reality, gender, identity politics, populist tactics, posthumanism and micro-stories. He often engages in strategies of the absurd, repurposing mythological narratives as well as science fiction and horror tropes towards a critical take on contemporary political dynamics.