“The Whole World is made to pass through the STRAW of the Culture industry”

“The Whole World is made to pass through the STRAW of the Culture industry”

Installation, straws, 240 x 400 x 0.5 cm. 2013/2022

In this work, I use plastic straws. I point to the dependence of the global capitalist system by threading hundreds of straws end to end into a single whole. However, one end of the straw starts from the south-east of the world, and proceeds upwards and westwards, knitting the borders of countries, proceeds to the north-west and ends in the most north-west. In fact, it refers to the exploitative relations between the global north and the global South.

Even though the pipettes remind us of oil, gas, etc. pipelines, this flow is also the pipeline of the culture industry. At this point, the work greets Theodor Adorno and takes its name from Adorno's sentence “the whole World is made to pass through the filter of the culture industry”.

This work is currently exhibited at the Ostrale 21 Biennale in Dresden in 2021, it will be exhibited in Kaunas in October 2022.

It is written about this artwork in the catalog of the Ostrale 21 Biennial:

“The famous sentence “the whole World is made to pass through the filter of the culture industry” by Theodor Adorno was part of his reflection about the state of the artwork with the development of the culture industry. The predominance of the effect, the obvious touch, and the technical detail over the work itself, he claimed, lead to the stereotyped appropriation of everything. By referring to Adorno, even appropriating his famous quote, Aydin consciously takes the huorous note, eplacing the “filter” by a “straw”. His World map made of the most ephemeral, colorful plastic object, plays with the balaty of economic explortation, while at the same time illustrates all the various gas- and other pipes that construct the geo-political map of inter-dependencies of the global capitalist exchange.”