Since the very beginning, Sinem Dişli's work focuses on feelings of abandonment and estrangement by questioning identity issue. Starting her journey with the exploration of family albums, Dişli's first photography series, Resistance was firmly grounded on the abandonment- fear of rejection, commitment, trust-intimacy and reconcilement-alienation issues. In her Anamnesis series, exhibited in 2009 at x-ist, she questioned 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.
In Dişli's most recent body of work, Imprint opening on November 15th at Han 38 with the collaboration of x-ist and Han 38, the artist interprets abandonment as a starting point, rather than a finish line, while memory becomes a metamorphic process, rather than a lost moment.
In Dişli's works, a neat denouement is not given away not but rather, each image further complicates the triangular relationship between the viewer, the image and the artist. The stories of each object and person in her works point out an infinite interaction. Dişli explores the leftovers, ceded objects, what is believed to return to live in a new form after its disappearance in the nature and the adaptation coming from change through her works.
Imprint does not represent a single emotion or state, but rather multiple states and emotions and it is the poetics of this plurality that cause the viewer to waver between different states of mind and the impact is jarring.
Dişli's last exhibition, Imprint goes beyond x-ist's space and meets with the audience at Han 38, an alternative non-institutional space in Karaköy. It invites the viewer to participate and enjoy the process of being confused, somehow manipulated and touched, and presents space and time to editorialize their own stories through images and installations in the series. The exhibit can be seen till November 30th, 2011 at Han 38.
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). She participated in the group, titled ‘Intersection IV’ (2010). Dişli took place in many group exhibitions in the USA, Cyprus and several places in Turkey including Bursa and İzmir. The artist also participated in 1st International ULIS fotoFEST Photography Festival, 1st International IFSAK Photography Biennial in Istanbul and Vienna Art Fair 2011.