SMS LOVE / YAMA & DIVA

An SMS & Dance Performance to send love around the world. Write the world a love poem, send it to the telephone number you see on the screen and billboards and watch as your message spreads, dancing, across the world over the screens a top of buildings and cities. SMS Love is the second part of the collaborative project Celebration, first instigated by conceptual artist Gul Kozacioglu in 2006. This unique second part of Celebration has been developed with the YAMA public screen and environs in mind. SMS Love sets up a tragic-romantic space between censorship and expressions of love. People are invited through advertising boards to send love messages to the Yama screen by SMS. When messages are received, a program filters them and choreographs a dance according to content, beaming messages to the public over the course of a month. Kozacioglu, whose name means smile in Turkish, developed SMS Love through an ongoing fascination with the Sufi love poetry of Rumi. She draws relationships between the Japanese Haiku and the contemporary instant expressions of everyday life we find in the SMS mobile text message. Kozacioglu points out to us that the SMS message reveals the state of our public consciousness, often a pure moment of sharing and recognition aside from the restraints of a society bound in late capitalism. This work is particularly pertinent for Turkey at the moment, where Youtube and WordPress blogs have been censored through Turkish court action. SMS Love both allows international public communication and is aware of the legal and national obstacles to achieving this perfect realm of communication. 

SMS LOVE was exhibited in Istanbul on the Marmara Pera Hotel screen with Mark Aerial Waller’s curation for YAMA in 2008 & in Copenhagen on a building facade above Café Det Elektriske Hjørne as part of a DIVA residency. SMS LOVE was produced with the kind support of PTT Film.