For a long time, I have been questioning the world of meanings that power constructs through binaries, and how these binaries become internalized in our lives. This inquiry leads me to the blurred relationship between the subaltern and authority — to states of resistance, obedience, and dependence. Starting from the female body, I construct an imaginary world where social and psychic layers intermingle. In this world, figures emerge sometimes from painting, sometimes from video, sometimes from performance; they transform into one another. What matters to me is to propose a new way of seeing and thinking by creating transitions between different media.
Suspicious Compromises is a continuation of this multilayered way of thinking. In this exhibition, I wanted to make visible how the subject is fragile yet resilient in the face of power, and how every compromise carries within it a form of conflict. I look at that uncertain cycle between obedience and resistance — the state of negotiation we all live in.
The main axis of the exhibition, which consists of four videos, is The Dance of Master and Slave. Drawing on Hegel’s “master–slave dialectic,” this operatic video tells of the subject’s dependence on power and the power games within relationships, moving through the shadows of our inner worlds. The alternative title Staging of Subjection also comes from here: I wanted to bring to the stage a space where the individual and the social become intertwined.
The video performance Under One Body is inspired by the Japanese bunraku puppet theatre. Here, I explore how the boundaries between body and identity, puppeteer and puppet, animate and inanimate become blurred. The tense relationship between costume and performer, for me, is both a confrontation and a search for a new freedom in relation to the body.
The exhibition also includes Submarine–Whale and Submission, videos previously shown in the Turkey Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale. These two works focus on states of confinement and restriction. In the passages between inside and outside, I seek a new emotional terrain within a sense of entrapment.Suspicious Compromises is an attempt to revisit the old games of power that have permeated our inner selves. Perhaps we are all somewhere within this invisible dance — sometimes as master, sometimes as slave. With this exhibition, I wanted to reveal the silent yet persistent zones of negotiation within that dance.
Photography by Nazlı Erdemirel