Ankara Fortress

Murat Akagündüz was a student at the fine arts faculty of Mimar Sinan University from 1988-1995. He shows modern life with its holiday resorts, colorful entertainments, shanty houses swallowed up by million-dollar, grandiose urban architecture, large malls with their swarming crowds and big highways that isolate different social classes. Akagündüz’s original approach encompasses his use of paint, choice of place and compositional structure. Each of his works also has a different narrative style. Interested in the politics of everyday life, Akagündüz reveals the political and symbolic elements that permeate urban living. In his previous works, he questioned the image culture (served by photography) by adding garish overtones to the dazzling adverts of travel agencies. More recently, he has explored the relationships between the public areas and buildings of the city by creating pictures from newspaper clippings of street clashes. In this series, Akagündüz uses symbols that denote the capital of Turkey, Ankara, and its cultural and political identity: thereby creating an imaginary world within a tangible reality.