Murtezaoglu, Aydan (TR)
Carlsberg Tap E
Aydan Murtezaoglu
Born 1961 in Istanbul, Turkey
Lives in Istanbul
Aydan Murtezaoglu is not an ordinary chronicler-documentarist. Her photographs offer both poetic and contemporary views of her everyday surroundings. Many facets of Turkish culture are condensed in her best known works in which the artist herself also plays an important role.
An untitled photograph shows the artist sitting on a bench; behind her we see the Bosperus and a spectacular view of Istanbul, both slanted against the bench and the ground, as if threatening to pour out of the digitally manipulated pictorial frame. The artist tilts her head in a motion of adjusting the unhinged horizontal, to bring life back into order and the world back into balance. We see the artist from the back only. Yet by being in the picture, she offers the viewer an opportunity to identify with her - to experience surroundings that have gone askew.
In her photographic work The Pilot (2003), a group of women are talking to each other in a public urban space, probably a waiting area in a central bus station. The artist in modern clothes seems to address a group of women, their faces caressed by the last rays of the sun and their long colourful skirts flying in the wind. Their rural appearance is out of touch with the urban environment, yet they radiate confidence, as if they had come from another time. Which indeed they might have, since it is quite possible that the image of these women has actually been taken from an older photograph of a rural scene. Maybe, however, this is a real coincidence, typical of a modern metropolis like Istanbul.
In this ambiguous situation, the artist is an enquirer who introduces a biographical narrative and offers identification in an absurd world, an enquirer, who unites the real world with an inner world by means of digital manipulation. Informed by the dramatic processes of change affecting Turkey today, Aydan Murtezaoglu's work illuminates a tense atmosphere: She portrays individuals as caught up between rural tradition and cosmopolitan modernism, between inner universe and real world. -AS
Lives in Istanbul
Aydan Murtezaoglu is not an ordinary chronicler-documentarist. Her photographs offer both poetic and contemporary views of her everyday surroundings. Many facets of Turkish culture are condensed in her best known works in which the artist herself also plays an important role.
An untitled photograph shows the artist sitting on a bench; behind her we see the Bosperus and a spectacular view of Istanbul, both slanted against the bench and the ground, as if threatening to pour out of the digitally manipulated pictorial frame. The artist tilts her head in a motion of adjusting the unhinged horizontal, to bring life back into order and the world back into balance. We see the artist from the back only. Yet by being in the picture, she offers the viewer an opportunity to identify with her - to experience surroundings that have gone askew.
In her photographic work The Pilot (2003), a group of women are talking to each other in a public urban space, probably a waiting area in a central bus station. The artist in modern clothes seems to address a group of women, their faces caressed by the last rays of the sun and their long colourful skirts flying in the wind. Their rural appearance is out of touch with the urban environment, yet they radiate confidence, as if they had come from another time. Which indeed they might have, since it is quite possible that the image of these women has actually been taken from an older photograph of a rural scene. Maybe, however, this is a real coincidence, typical of a modern metropolis like Istanbul.
In this ambiguous situation, the artist is an enquirer who introduces a biographical narrative and offers identification in an absurd world, an enquirer, who unites the real world with an inner world by means of digital manipulation. Informed by the dramatic processes of change affecting Turkey today, Aydan Murtezaoglu's work illuminates a tense atmosphere: She portrays individuals as caught up between rural tradition and cosmopolitan modernism, between inner universe and real world. -AS