Open Phone Booth

Exploring injustices based on identity, social domination and oppression mechanisms, Nilbar Güreş works with various media such as collage, painting, drawing, photography, video and sculpture. The artist constructs provocative scenes where she not only focuses on the practices of being visible, invisible, and the state of being ignored in public and private spaces, but also investigates the ways in which these practices are transformed into opportunities for resistance. Güreş employs elements of staging and performance for her inquiry into the politics of representation and symbols.

Her series titled "Open Phone Booth" consists of a three-channel video, images, and collages. The series was conceived during the artist’s visit to her family village in 2007, which she had not been able to travel to for many years, due to a declared state of emergency. This Kurdish-Alawi village close to the city of Bingöl is the place her father was born. It had been left isolated, and had remained deprived of infrastructural facilities like water, roads, and telecommunication. The phone lines built in the region in the 1970s were destroyed during an armed conflict in the 1980s, and were not restored until 2011. Although most of the people living in the village were using mobiles, they had to scale the surrounding hills to make calls, since the village was not included in the coverage area of any GSM operator. On the one hand, Güreş shows her audience photographs of individual villagers who have climbed the steep hills to be able to communicate with the outside world; while on the other, she draws attention to the social and geographical realities of the village, and scenes in relation to its infrastructure, in the context of communication, and lack thereof.

Video stills