Statement 2019
Transcription of the statement for the 21st Biennial
My work Off White Tulips, presented at the 21st Biennial, can be seen as a queer memoir set in Istanbul. The city has changed drastically, and also its inhabitants—the places shifted, or constantly rotate, yet I don’t see this as an ultimately bad thing. The queer visibility has grown out immensely; sadly, the violence has also increased. In 2003 there were a handful of queer activists out here to read the first public statement of the pride, then I remember the facial expressions of the professional activists during the Gezi protests in 2013, which was a sudden surprise, as they were encountered by so many unorganized yet willing to participate queers from the periphery of the city.
Upon my migration to Germany in 2008, my search for an artistic form has intensified because I felt like I had lost my audience. Trying to establish an audience of my own, I discovered that my work consists of an act of translation that allows for a profound exploration of questions of language and simultaneity. I usually adapt photographic concepts of aperture, shutter and exposure into modalities and temporalities that allow myself and my collaborators (as well as my audience) to shift and occupy different timescapes, and to re-imagine the presumed characteristics of my subject matters: two-gether-ness and com(m)unity. And I would have never arrived at these ideas hadn’t I migrated to Germany.
It is interesting that in Turkish, our point of departure for defining friendship is arkadaşlık, a sense of direction, as we locate our friend where we had left them, bringing our minds back to a notion of the past, an arkada. As I often depart from a probable shared (past) moment, it is impossible for me to make sense of my artistic practice in the absence of this word. Many of these arkadaş along the way from Istanbul to Berlin have pressed themselves on my soul, leaving prescriptive yet liberating marks.