The Confessions Questionnaire

Your name/nickname.

Izzet: Izzet.

Bert: Bert Gilbert.

Current mood in one word.

Izzet: Trapped.

Bert: Hopeful.

What is your favourite dish?

Izzet: Karnıyarık, a Turkish aubergine dish with minced meat.

Bert: Aji de Gallina – a Peruvian chicken dish I was taught by a Peruvian granny.

Tea or coffee?

Izzet: One cup of coffee mornings, then tea throughout the day.

Bert: Coffee via filter in the morning with cinnamon, cardamom and double cream. Herbal teas throughout the day.

Favourite place you’ve travelled to and why?

Izzet: Tokyo.

Bert: Amazonian Jungle.

Favourite movie?

Izzet: Hard to pick, but recently I really enjoyed a Nan Goldin documentary, “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” by Laura Poitras.

Bert: Old – True Romance, new – Triangle of Sadness and Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon.

Favourite book or poem and why?

Izzet: Hard to pick again, but more recent The Accidental by Ali Smith.

Bert: The Hidden World by Professor Carl Ruch.

Your Life Motto or favourite quote?

Izzet: ‘Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes,’ by Carl Jung.

Bert: “I bleed between the lines” – my way of describing my practice.

“You may be entitled to compensation” – for any situation that is slightly inconvenient.

“I’m in the bush outside and I really love you,” from my friend Babak Ganjei’s poster range.

What or who inspires you the most in life?

Izzet: Yayoi Kusama, Carl Jung, Esther Perel.

Bert: My dear friend and pro-witch Kate Tomas.

Greg Stoker – for anti-imperial activism overviews.

Motaz Azaiza for direct news from Gaza.

Three unique things about where you live?

Izzet: People, food, galleries.

Bert: I live in Broadway market – it can be exhausting as so touristy now but it has great coffee (La Bouche and % arabica), and my favourite bartenders at Elliot’s for a perfect negroni, and lots of great places to eat.

A piece of advice you’d give to your younger self.

Izzet: ‘Don’t worry!’

Bert: Don’t be so hard on yourself and you are funnier and more beautiful than you think. Not everyone is going to like you don’t bother trying to appease them – you are marmite in human form.

How do you escape a creative block?

Izzet: Regenerative class at Lift, the gym I go to. Or ask my dreams for guidance.

Bert: Shift the focus; exercise, play, look at things upside down / from a different point of view, mess things up. Mostly when things are blocked there needs to be a risky action taken to move through it.

Do you have a favourite colour?

Izzet: I like combinations of colours more than a single colour and those combinations change all the time depending on my mood.

Bert: Multi-coloured.

Favourite art tool?

Izzet: Needle and thread.

Bert: 0.05 technical pens.

Is your studio messy or tidy?

Izzet: Both

Bert: BOTH

Why did you become an artist?

Izzet: Sometimes there are no reasons, it just is.

Bert: Although you can learn to be an artist, I believe it’s archetypal/ you and you either are or you aren’t. I have no choice which is a blessing on one hand but can also be a curse.

What is the most challenging or exciting thing about being an artist?

Izzet: To be constantly in connection with personal and collective unconscious which sometimes can be scary, yet exciting.

Bert: Challenging  – The gatekeeping, the lack of clear career trajectory, the existentialism that an art practice entails.

Exciting: working out how to make a new piece of work, researching and then completing it – there is a moment that lasts about 30 seconds where you realise you’ve made something from nothing / your imagination, that nobody asked you to but it’s made you laugh and gives you a sense of achievement- only fleeting but it makes up for a lot of the hardships endured.

Also, I love working in good collaboration for this reason as you get to share this joy/ the private joke with someone else.

Craziest artistic experiment you've tried.

Bert: A workshop in Athens with Diana J Torres exploring how to make the body into a human bongo with contact mics inserted internally.

Funniest criticism you’ve received.

Bert: From a gallerist who rejected me years ago and came back after I had been in a big show at Somerset House, he told me that when he met me before/ why he had previously ignored me was because I was “ bullish and too confident, and that now my work was relevant” – he was commenting on the piece I was showing that was an iteration of the work he had previously rejected – I asked him if he would call a man bullish… and told him that my work was based in the esoteric so relevancy was a moot point.

Describe your style in three words.

Izzet: Visceral, ritualistic, inviting.

Bert: Strong, playful, non casual.

Most memorable artistic achievement.

Izzet: Our Sinistry show ‘The Game of Life’ in 2021.

Bert: My recent piece The Vesica at Somerset House, a site-specific installation as part of The Horror Show.

Dream collaboration (with someone dead or alive)

Izzet: Bert Gilbert – living, Louise Bourgeois – dead.

Bert: Living- Alejandro Jodorowsky and Izzet Ers; Dead – Hilma AF Klint

If you could exhibit anywhere, where would it be?

Izzet: Tate

Bert: Tate, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, MOMA