Cenk Gungor

DOE NORMAAL dan ben je al genoeg een vreemdeling

Cenk Gungor, Installation with prints on PVC and “Guess Who” game, 2024

Anyone can be a stranger. Especially when everyone else is normal. And sometimes being a stranger makes everything else seem strange.

In the official Dutch immigration lingo, “foreigner” is translated as “vreemdeling” which literally means “stranger” But what is so strange about someone who is not from here? 

Amsterdam increasingly receives a flux of foreigners in the form of immigrants, expats, students, or anything in between. This causes an inevitable clash between locals and newcomers. When standing on the different sides of the fence, it is easy to interpret the other as abnormal. But in reality, is it the locals who show their monstrous faces to a stranger, or does a stranger tend to victimize himself, alienating everyone else?

In this series, which aims to be the start of a larger story in different media, Cenk combines his experience as a foreigner who moved to Amsterdam a while ago and his love for humorous observation. He depicts everyday moments that are undeniably ordinary for locals, yet extremely unusual for someone from outside. In this case this someone is a humanoid dog called Garip. Garip is a Turkish word that is hard to translate, as it combines the meanings of strange, miserable, and foreign. Using monsters as Garip’s interpretations of strangers’ behaviors, Cenk materializes two sides of the local versus foreigner discussion. 

In these three pieces, he taps into traditional animation techniques, such as smear and layering, in order to show movements deemed “niet normaal” in a static medium.