To be invited to write a short essay on a piece by Selim Birsel, who has been invited to make that piece for exhibition in Copenhagen and invited to invite someone to write for this occasion, is to be taken up in a sort of swirl of invitations and invitings. What supports or sustains these acts and meanings, these acts of meaning? One might open an invitation, if one expects one, in a hurry, anxious not to miss the event in question. And yet, one knows that, if one is to make it to the event - receive the invitation in advance, and be able to go prepared - one will have to contain one's anticipation of what is promised, of what is to come. And one may reflect, in the process, that the one who invites has extended the invitation - as the idiom has it in English - without certain knowledge of it being accepted or, as it were, fulfilled. An invitation, to be given well, has to be given with risk of not being fulfilled or taken up.

The experience of viewing which Selim Birsel's work offers seems to me to participate in this sense of an invitation; an invitation to view which may not get taken up. Perhaps everything that is made to be art, at the request of commissioning institutions, whose representatives approach people already known as and answerable to the title of being artists, needs to pass through this sense of risk, if the work to be made is not just to confirm a circuit which entails excluding a sense of what art might be by including something as art - something believed to be, or believed to be knowable as art. Selim Birsel is as exposed to this responsibility as is any practising artist; and exposure here is inevitably a risk of not being able to respond: not to be able to make something in response to an invitation which would not just be a response.

Exposure to view would then be part of the negotiation of the possibility of response. Art, in a circuit of invitations, becomes a practice of exposure. What does this entail? Schematically, so far as this concerns visual art, neither revelation nor adequation: neither revealing the world, nor making an adequate image or model of, or for, it. Yet, in an apparent paradox, it may be a bit of both: images or works which promise revelation and which represent; and, in doing both, keep both alive, by enabling them to be reinvented. Art may involve us in these processes, by handing on invitations to view the meaning of which has not been decided in advance.

So it is peculiar to write when a piece has not yet been executed. It may be planned - Selim Birsel has been working with the piece planned for Copenhagen for three years. A wall drawing, of a window in a wall - covering the wall with charcoal to make an image, as if to restore what is to be erased. And then, to hang from a nail a gun, hung as if pointing to the vanishing point of the drawing - a toy gun as if trained on an imaginary and virtual point, beyond the window which has been drawn there: toying with the truth of the image. The gun-object is thus to hang around in front of the drawn image, covering part of what has already covered the wall, obstructing a view. If we were inclined to remove it, though, reach out and take it away, to reveal the image, we would be caught up in circuits of imitation - with toys, but also of gestures. The drawn image becomes surface of gesture and movement, a zone of a body not present but haunting the space of viewing.

Thus the work invites a viewing from which the distance given by images withdraws - drawing as withdrawal of the image and as appearance of the marking process by which it has been - or rather, is to be - made. And if the mark appears, so does the absence of mark - the window becomes imaginary and virtual, gaps in which the wall (re)appears while the window appears to disappear. Neither revealed nor represented, the window becomes a space of a transmission of light - more direct than an actual window, without refraction, if not without delay. No longer a window on the world, as in the traditions of the Italian Renaissance, the image is more a record of movements in light.

Exposure brings to mind the discourse of photography. But photography is the mechanical control of this exposure to light which Selim Birsel's piece Open a room, close a room is planned to dramatise. The camera, like the camera obscura before it, is revealed as a surrogate body, a delimited space in which the touch of light can be contained and exposure to view can be controlled. The ideals which such devices support are thus both of the image and of the thing - ideal spaces for ideal things, from which, crucially, the body of the viewer can be withdrawn, as if into a zone of protection. Architecture, the construction of built space, is exposed as the construction of ideal interiors, as the image is withdrawn from its protective role. And the place of art in the spaces of institutions is replayed as a history of invitations to toy with what might appear to appear there.

Without the image as protection, as revelation of intended truth, or representation of apparent truth, the invitation to view is extended at the risk of some anxiety and frustration. What are we supposed to do? Take the gun? Take aim along some line of vision? Perhaps just to stand before the window - as if facing it, somewhat foolishly, apparently in deception, while it appears not to appear. Before it reappears. To imagine a world without built space, without images, exposed to the relay of light, and to the deceptions of what appears to guide our projects and even our perceptions. In place of this space of plans and projects comes the gestures of drawing - or rather, they come as they have already gone, up and down, from side to side, to the left and right and back again.

Here there will have been drawing, and the nailing of a nail to the wall, on which to hang a toy. To plan this is to risk exposure: of the one who looks, but also of the manners of a body, acting in space. The work is apparently divided in itself, between covering and exposing, between covering the wall and exposing an object: gestures of rhythm and expressivity; and a punctual gesture, piercing and disturbing if not destroying the drawing. This other gesture plays another hand; another mode of using. But this gesture, apparently instrumental, practical, is also caught up in the appearances of the drawing, the representation of space which provides a direction to point a gun, or a toy. The split between the practical and the expressive body is (to be) rehearsed again.

Open a room, close a room is planned, then, to invite us into these modes of viewing: of imagining a world without the ideals of built space, even without the ideals of images, in particular those which provide an aim for the look, on which a gun might be trained. It is a piece of imaginary trespass, therefore: opening up all possible rooms, to one another, and to the reserves of space between them, and between them and what lies outside; and satirising taking aim, as if we could step beyond these reserves of space, turn all views into a window on a target, a line of sight beyond an imaginary plane of protection. As if we would be safe lining up behind our guns.

In his previous work too, Selim Birsel has problematised the life of the body divided between domestic refuge and military action. Exchanging empty vacuum cleaner bags for used ones, using their dust and dirt as if to colour in the figure of a house on the floor, pinning the bags to a wall above, From the dust of our house to the house of our dusts recorded a sort of curiosity about what is swept up and hidden away indoors. Before this, in Dust to dust, similar curls of domestic remains taken from vacuum cleaner bags were arranged to figure a tank as if sliding across the floor beneath our feet, with a handleless broom propped across the corner of the wall beyond, or above: as if the tank was pursuing its direction of stealth to defend the damaged broom, or the clean space.

The spaces of the gallery are thereby traversed by the meanings of other spaces. But his work also involves the contrary movement, where perhaps the play of meanings of art empties the meanings of other spaces, as in Sleep of Lead, in which sheets of paper coated and finished in graphite resembling the bodies which had lain under them haunted the entrance hall of the railway station in Ankara. Lying prone and vulnerable on the marble floor, these casts in paper of bodies, like outsize pieces of paper thown down by travellers on the trains, provoked contention as to their meaning: greys on white and grey marble, they were like camouflaged bodies, like tokens of military bodies displayed as if in pathos of struggle or contemputuous triumph. The meanings of death and of the body themselves provoked a struggle, which did not, quite, end when the piece was removed ahead of time.

In each of these previous pieces, there has been a play with the components of drawing: with dust, with lights and darks, with graphite and with paper. This play is to be extended again, a practice on this genre of art, which moves matter around across a surface, to cover, to reveal; to show and to represent. The challenge appears to be a sort of frankness or candour: what will show - of the material used and the surface touched with that material. Respectful neither of the desires for privacy or secrecy, the risk of exposure is nevertheless mediated by this involvement with matter and with the occasion of drawing, the occasion provided by the invitation to work as an artist.

Discussing the project for Copenhagen, the tasks involved in drawing were brought up for consideration: how bodies reflect and absorb light; a sense of their temperature; how to treat the limits of a body in the open space of a drawing. It seems that to write about Selim Birsel's work today is to hand on these concerns, concerns which guide and may guide the execution of the piece Open a room, close a room, for Copenhagen and perhaps, again, elsewhere. (A version of the piece is planned for Istanbul too.) In each case, the work is to work with the exposure to the responsbility for making art, wherever it is promised in advance and planned as such; an exposure which is perhaps only to be justified by working with being exposed before there is something definite to see, something to focus on, to take aim at, even if we are all marked by this process of reaction, of being put on our guard.

We discussed what kind of image this construction of a room with a window and walls and floors might be; the direction of the making of marks on a wall as if to represent these things and this space. Around the reserve of space on the wall left to figure the window and the passage of light, it seemed, the image might seem to extend. An image would always extend, but perhaps some images retrace this sense of the extensiveness of an image, no matter how small. The image which approaches leaving space to represent, risks losing space to representation, insists on this extensiveness, back along the lines which compose what appears to lie ahead of us. The drawing is to enable us to retrace the lines of sight which the gun dramatises and, spreading out before us, extends so as to be viewed. An invitation to view...