Ferhat Özgür

Tower of Democracy, 2017, Ballot boxes, metal shelving, 130 x 284 x 127 cm

Tower of Democracy consists of six wooden ballot boxes placed on a six-tier metal shelving unit that appears to have been removed from a government office. The uppermost box bears the title “Member of Parliament” and represents parliamentary elections. Moving downwards, we encounter ballot boxes labelled with titles corresponding to different levels of bureaucracy, until we reach the box marked “Mukhtar,” the most local representative of the bureaucratic system. At the very bottom are anonymous ballot boxes bearing no title at all. In summary, even in elections where every person’s vote has an equal value of “one unit,” regardless of who they are, we still encounter a hierarchical structure of social categories imposed by bureaucracy. Conceived as a clear proposition on how bureaucracy can bring democracy under its control, the work also gives physical form to the ways in which the machinery of the state can become detached from the organism known as society. Tower of Democracy rises through references to bureaucracy’s categorisation of society, its impositions upon it, and its condescending, top-down perspective. Through the juxtaposition of the wolf and the tower, the work places us at the centre of the manipulations operating between bureaucracy and the machinery of the state.