Body Geography

Created in various mediums such as photography, video, performance and installation, as well as drawing, since the 1980s, İnci Eviner’s works are inspired by mythology, history, literature, and philosophy. Inquiring subjecthood, relations between the body, power and authority, gender, and modernisation, the artist uses organic materials such as wax, copper and leather, and incorporates motion picture techniques and performance into her practice.

In 1993, Eviner exhibited a series of “object-paintings” under the title "Geography", which translated the two dimensions (of paper) into to the three dimensions (of object). These works, each in the form of a hill and exhibited for the first time at Taksim Art Gallery, create a map-surface that interconnects the images and symbols of the earth and humanity. Eviner’s hills, turning into human bodies, unify geography and the human body on a single surface, in a single form. The series "Body Geography", which consists of seven grand hills, provides a landscape of humanity that brings together the terrestrial and the celestial and a portable geography. Portraying figures with copper, acrylic, asphalt and leather on curved and raised plywood surfaces, Eviner invites the audience to explore the human body through the concept of geography with the forms she creates based on found images and anatomical drawings. Establishing a network of relations between nature and culture, these works also aim to heal – through images and symbols – a bond damaged due to the modernisation process.

"Body Geography" is a series of paintings that arise at an intersection at which the surface is converted into form. When they come together within the space, the works which resemble dynamic forms of nomadic culture ready to change their location at any moment evoke a moorland landscape.