Eyes

Eyes

"Everything that is made beautiful, fair and lovely is made for the eye of one who sees."
  Mevlana Celaleddin Rumi

As the great Anatolian mystic Mevlana once said, beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. However, our eyes also envy beauty, as well as success or happiness. That’s why we have developed beliefs and charms to protect ourselves from envy and other malevolent feelings in different cultures over centuries. 

Amongst them, the “eye amulet” in the round shape of a cobalt-blue eye is one of the most  renowned ones. In many cultures, including Persian, Turkish, Greek, Arab, Afghan and Hindu, the eye amulet is believed to dispel the ill effects of the evil eye (Nazar in Arabic and also in Turkish), a malicious gaze out of envy.

Ironically, in our digital age, we constantly envy others and want to being envied by them. That’s why, we share our most special and happiest moments on social media while mostly hiding unhappiness and everyday difficulties. Through our perpetual and voluntary generation of personal information, we also allow governments and big corporations to monitor us. We are almost living in an Orwellian dystopia in which surveillance is ubiquitous and inevitable. Thus, we perhaps need the eye amulet more than ever today.  

In “Eyes”, interaction begins with the presence of a viewer. When the viewer stands in front of the screen, the closed eyes awake, and the ones that have already been open start looking straight as if they directly look at the viewer.