Pay Here
The audience & the subject, the exhibitionist & the voyeur, the sadist & the masochist are the most crucial polarizations that can be defined in the woman - man relationship axis. The tension created by this power relation between the genders was what initially promted Gözde Türkkan to an inner search to reconcile her own sexual role and identity. She moved through this process experiencing various discovery methods such as kick-boxing and pole-dancing. Türkkan wasn't surprised that she enjoyed not only the activities using or celebrating her female sexuality but also the martial arts.
"Pay Here" is the title of Türkkan's project on gender politics, which she finds appealing as much as it is compelling, acknowledging that it is only partially true to establish the sides as subject:woman & viewer:man. Photographs taking place in the show represent the slim in-between gap where Türkkan can face her inner conflicts and make peace with her gender role. The artist describes this in-between area as: "The pole-dancing photographs especially provide this because they are carried out in a venue that is outside expectations/stereotypes. In addition, the women who are aware of the objectification that comes with the dance, neither exploit it aggressively nor let themselves be exploited."
Türkkan's approach, aims to break the common beliefs and perspectives without asserting that the point of view in this series is the only truth. The artist thinks that it is a complex situation and one view point cannot explain the whole. Consisting of two volumes and 50 special editions, "Pay Here" artist books and the flip-books with two different content, are the other elements of this project taking place in the show.
GÖZDE TÜRKKAN, Ankara, 1984
After graduating from İstanbul Bilgi University, Faculty of Communications, Department of Photography and Video in 2008, Türkkan worked as a photography course instructor in the Visual Communications Department of the same university. She continued her education in University of the Arts London, Central Saint Martins, College of Art and Design (London, UK), where she received her MA degree in 2010. The artist participated in !f İstanbul Independent Film Festival (2007) and group shows in santralistanbul (2008) and Tershane (2008).
Anamnesis - Recollection
The photographs of Sinem Dişli, who believes that the world stands between reality and fantasy, is somewhere between fiction and document. The artist questions how our senses recreate our body and the object, how our stand in the ever-changing, reflecting universe varies from sense to sense, place to place and culture to culture.
Dişli's photography series "Anamnesis - Recollection" is about the confrontation that comes with remembering. It's a reaction to the temporality of memory and how it comes back to us after it is rearranged by the system. With this series, Dişli investigates how the memory revives by bringing out those who have been neglected by the society that praises normality and studies how we comprehend and respond to things.
As a method to confront the past, the artist dresses her models with clothes of her family members, covers them with water which she perceives as the location/contour, or carries them to places in nude as if remembering them as an invocation and recalls whatever is happening around us from the collective memory. In this way, by inclining to remember her own story once again and experiencing others' memories seeing them through her own, turning our reality upside down as the subject and the audience. Thus, the subjects find themselves in conflict with their reality and memory at that place/state: museums, bridges, city ruins, Istanbul, New York, unemployed, natural and isolated.
Dişli believes that the places and the iconic structures that are experienced everyday are related with one's own memory and the collective memory. Art critic Wendy M. K. Shaw interprets Dişli's series "Anamnesis - Recollection" as: "My personal experience becomes a figure for that of humanity, and that of humanity becomes my personal experience. The photographic image has always already become my past: the photograph becomes a virus. Replacing the machinations of history with its own, it infiltrates memory and makes it possible to live in Istanbul and New York as though they were one, as though they shared a single history. After all, they do."
SİNEM DİŞLİ Şanlıurfa, 1982
After completing her graduate degree in Marmara University, Department of Photography in 2007, Dişli worked as an assistant curator for photography at the Istanbul Modern Museum between 2005-2008. In 2008, she was selected for the summer residency program in OCTET: School of Visual Arts, New York (NY, USA). Dişli took place in many group exhibitions in the USA, Cyprus and several places in Turkey including Bursa and İzmir. The artist joined 1st International ULIS fotoFEST Photography Festival and 1st International IFSAK Photography Biennial in Istanbul.