During Skulptur Projekte Münster 2017, Kasper called me with an urgent matter. “Ayşe,” he said, “we have a problem with your work. It has become too popular – we must do something about it!” I could understand him: he was one of the very few curators who believed that popularity in art could potentially lead to a problem or already was a problem. As he said in one of his interviews, “A sculpture is what stands in the way.” [1] I think his concern was that too many people were going to see my sculpture intentionally. It was not in the way; actually, it was the way. It did not create friction; people were happy about it! These qualities of the work would have been a happy coincidence for some other curators, but not for Kasper. Because people sough entertainment, desire, and fun in experiencing the work, he feared that the concept behind it would be neglected. Although Kasper himself was an incredibly fun person. He had an amazing sense of humor, and sometimes he could be hilarious.

No doubt, he was a brilliant curator, always on the side of the artist, making things simple and easy for them so that no one would be bothered by anything aside from art. He believed in the artists he worked with – critique from outside did not bother him. He enthusiastically persisted in realizing artworks against all obstacles.

He liked taking risks, even while doing something as simple as bicycling – I saw him cycling down steps in Rotterdam during Manifesta. Or, when attending a serious meeting – he could be brave enough to be exaggeratedly outspoken without calculating the outcome. Kasper was always deliberating about art and making spontaneous statements that were like art themselves, sometimes so instant that it took time to understand them. He left what he said in the air like clouds, like small birds flying, to be remembered and made sense of at a later moment. His was a very unique language, with unpredictable opinions, that I feel lucky to have witnessed.

Kasper said he had his very own facebook: thousands of cut-out photo portraits of people he knew, all from different sources, pasted into a thick notebook. He could wander inside the pages of that facebook and then send postcards to the people in it; in my case, the cards were sometimes collages featuring belly dancers and men wearing fezzes, knowing well that these clichés and symbolic gestures were as distant and as funny to me as to him. He could do this in an easygoing manner, sure that I was very much aware of his tough and severe attitude when it came to discrimination of any nature. I will miss those humorous cards.

The last one I received from him arrived just a few weeks before he passed away. It was an early birthday card, a black-and-white collage with a cloud-like white shape on the upper left side. Aside from the birthday part, he wrote, “from now on things will be not so cool.” It was both a personal and a political message. He left us two days after my birthday. Sadly, I feel the “not so cool days” approaching.