Untitled (after Ramiz Gökçe)

Aydan Murtezaoğlu’s oeuvre includes series composed of paintings and screen-prints, as well as works of photography, video-fanzine, texts, three-dimensional installations, and space arrangements which host a performance. Taking current and historical references into consideration, Murtezaoğlu explores the political and cultural environment of Turkey in the 1990s, shaped by urbanisation, globalisation, economic crises, and the politicisation of religion. In her works, which occasionally also include autobiographical references, Murtezaoğlu searches for the possibilities of experiencing a subjectivity based on encounters, conflicts, and interaction.

Her four-piece series is a photographic reinterpretation of an illustration by Ramiz Gökçe that centres on the alphabet the artist recalls from her childhood memories. In her work "Untitled (after Ramiz Gökçe)", the artist carries out an inquiry into the implications of, and conditions surrounding, the formation of an individual sense of justice, and alludes to the alphabet illustration mentioned, in which people of different ages and animals live together in joy and harmony. The work brings together two horizontal photographs that deal with the idea of plurality, with two vertical photographs that focus on the relationship between big and small. These photographs, which avoid suggesting any sort of order, also function as alternatives to one another. A careful look reveals both the uneasiness and awkwardness in the body language and movements of the human and animal figures, and invites the audience to consider the constraints of this coexistence that seemed like a happy union at first glance.