"SHE IS NOT HERE"
2O16
The project, titled “She is not here”, which was created using multiple disciplines, seems to be the effort of women to thrive as individuals and the drift to irrelevance in the face of patriarchal structures and their extensions, but I should make it clear that this work, which I created on the basis of my own experiences, tells the story of the individual, regardless of gender. My references were the history of art and contemporary art.
The installation consists of five elements: photograph, video, graffiti, oil painting, and object. When creating the main form of the work, my inspiration was Kara Walker’s late silhouettes with the themes of race, violence and slavery, and Robert Longo’s male figures that appear to be strong, but fall as they stand. The painting and the dress, the narrative elements of the installation, are parts that reference surrealist and metaphysical art. The vulture-man is a symbolic portrait of the structure that destroys the individual. The empty dress hanging on the hanger, which no longer contains an individual, was inspired by Magritte and Robert Gober. The black and white video, which tells the story of the procession and disappearance of the individual, was based on the Russian director Eisenstein’s psychoanalytic montage technique. In the last piece of my installation, the photograph, I placed my own portrait in a shot that contains the shadow of Andre Kertész, one of the photographers that I was inspired by, thus bringing the individual and the shadow face to face. The invisible element of the work is time. The time it takes to view the work from end to end materializes time, the invisible element of the installation.
