Statement 2019
Transcription of the statement for the 21st Biennial
Art is just a very small section in our world, but visuals are faster than language, and they deliver feelings much faster than words. In my work I mostly offer another idea or circumstance to change the given ones, but sometimes letting people face situations which they would normally avoid can also be a plan to make people aware of their daily impressions. To me, feminism is one of the forms of this resistance related to world justice, but it is also a natural attitude that can be adopted by everyone, not only by women. My work mostly focuses on social injustice, human relations, history, present, local and global identity politics. I am, of course, interested in resistance in general; for instance, how things were practiced in history in resisting against fascist and sexist politics? And what are the practices of today?
The work I’m presenting, Torn, started from my friendship with Didem. I met my friend Didem in Istanbul on the trans pride day a few years back. During the time we met she had had a breast surgery and had just started working as a trans sex worker in Istanbul, in an area that is not very safe in many ways. Didem was considering to move to another district that might be safer for her, but in between something terrible happened. Didem was kidnapped by three men who robbed her and slit her neck open. She barely survived. I was shocked when I received the horrifying news. Right after this incident, Didem moved. After a long conversation with my friend Didem I decided to make Torn with her support.
Torn is a work, a reaction to the negative conclusion of common violent moments/acts marked by leading sexist and homophobic politics. Torn can also be seen as a document of these political results. Inhuman major politics create a false memory to manipulate and erase our subjective perception and its evidences. Normalizing social violence is definitely one of the strongest methods to achieve that. Human violence is a result of our personal behavior and also of our votes; it is constructed socially and politically by ourselves.