SELF ORIENTATIONS
Şükran Moral, Bordello, 1997. Performance documentation, 8 min
SELF-ORIENTATIONS
SELF-ORIENTATIONS brings together artists from Turkey and Lebanon whose moving image works incorporate queer & feminist self-makings using, manipulating, and correcting the orientalist gaze, voluptuous fantasies, and perennial expectations from the oriental other. Curated by Alper Turan and conceived within the Partisans of the Nude: An Arab Art Genre in an Era of Contest, 1920 -1960 exhibition, SELF-ORIENTATIONS includes artists’ video, documentary, essay film, performance documentation, and desktop film by İz Öztat & Ra, Deniz Pasha, Şükran Moral, Nadir Sönmez, Ardıl Yalınkılıç and Akram Zaatari. This screening program flips the oriental lens reduced to passive imagery and objectification, bringing forth fervent narratives of libidinal energies, feminist audacities, queer storytelling and black revisionism of orients and orientations. Through the scenes from photography studios, Ottoman harem, İstanbul brothel to Amed streets, selected works vibrate the positions of the viewer and the viewed, exposed, and exposer, the urge to show and the need to hide the bodies.
The exhibition, Partisans of the Nude: An Arab Art Genre in an Era of Contest, 1920–1960, offers a unique perspective on the significance of nude art in former Ottoman territories transitioning into Arab identity. The exhibition defies both nationalist and Orientalist narratives by emphasizing the nude genre, often considered taboo and practically absent from Arab art production, and its role in shaping post-Ottoman societies and modern Islamic identity, during pivotal political shifts. On a parallel trajectory, diving deeper into the fringes of the nude genre and complementing the exhibition temporally and geographically, SELF-ORIENTATIONS brings forth contemporary artists from post-Ottoman Turkey who boldly employ their bodies and intimate moments as instruments of expression and critique.
Through these works, whether emanating from a sexual and racial critique, of queer desire, a daring semi-nude public appearance, or the sharing of deeply personal moments, the screening program introduces naked bodies, albeit not fully unclad but bald and exposed. Just as the nude genre in the Partisans of the Nude exhibition presents a narrative alternate to both nationalist and Orientalist discourses, the artists featured in SELF-ORIENTATIONS use moving images to reimagine self-representation and self/other dichotomies in the making of orients and orientations.
Central to this screening program’s discourse is the fascinating confluence of recreated or fictional photography studio scenes by Akram Zaatari and İz Öztat & Ra’s, both of whom employ the powerful setting of a photography studio as a locus of memory and self-representation. Akram Zaatari’s Her + Him bridges the realms of timeless photography and dynamic video, foregrounding a woman’s audacious embrace of her sensuality within the transformative socio-cultural milieu of Egypt and elegantly traversing between the stillness of photography and the fluid motion of video. Echoing this, İz Öztat and Ra’s Boo Boo offers an improvisational glance into queer desire, orientalist aesthetics, and the power of representation in forming selves. While Armenian-İstanbulite Zişan and British-expat Vita Sackville-West’s love story blossoms amidst the camera flashes, it also holds a mirror to the orientalist embellishments present in the photographic studios of early 20th-century Istanbul. In her 1997 performance Bordello, Şükran Moral boldly confronts the commodification of the female body by exposing herself in an Istanbul brothel, a site dating back to the Ottoman Empire. Through this act, she not only critiques societal views on women’s bodies but also challenges the art world’s tendencies. Her reclamation of the brothel as a modern art museum further merges the artist’s body with the broader narrative of female objectification.
Deniz Pasha’s Orientation provides a poignant revision in the form of a desktop film. Sudanese Turkish artist Pasha reclaims narratives, spotlighting the oft-overlooked black figures in art made in the Orientalist genre and connecting their silenced pasts to their vibrant, contemporary identities. She extracts black figures from the shadows of orientalist artworks and juxtaposes them with today’s Afro-Turks, thereby breaking the chains of racial degradation. Ardıl Yalınkılıç’s The Gaze brings us to contemporary European perceptions of Oriental stereotypes, exemplified in his interview video for which he asked his fellow art school students in the Netherlands to put themselves in his shoes, speculating, ‘‘Who is he?’’ as someone coming from Turkey. Unraveling the complexities of perception and inherent biases, Yalınkılıç highlights the vast chasm of understanding even amidst seemingly empathetic terrain. Concluding the program, Nadir Sönmez’s Boran unravels a complex triangle of desire, identity, and race distinctions from a queer lived experience. Part of a lecture performance by Sönmez, the essay video follows him as a Turkish artist from Istanbul in his research trip to Amed, Kurdish capital (Diyarbakır in Turkish), exposing the enduring power interplays of self and other, occident/orient, even within ultra-nationalist Turkey.
SELF-ORIENTATIONS is presented by ArteEast in collaboration with the Wallach Art Gallery as part of the legacy program Unpacking the ArteArchive, which preserves and presents 20 years of film and video programming by ArteEast. The film screening is curated by Alper Turan in conjunction with the Wallach Art Gallery exhibition, Partisans of the Nude: An Arab Art Genre in an Era of Contest, 1920-1960 curated by Kirsten Scheid.
PROGRAM
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Akram Zaatari, Her + Him VAN LEO, 2001-2012, documentary, 33 min., Egypt / Lebanon
In 1998, Zaatari interviewed Egyptian photographer Van Leo in Cairo. In 2001 he made the video Her + Him Van Leo and based it on the story of a woman who once entered Studio Van Leo and asked the artist to take pictures of her naked. At the time, Zaatari had access to a few of the woman's twelve pictures. In 2010 Zaatari came across the entire series showing "Nadia" undressing in twelve poses and expanded the original work into this HD remastered version.
This documentary utilizes traditional portrait photography and video in a dialogue between two media: crafted black and white print, and the electronically colored and manipulated screen. This dialog comments on the transformations in art practices and terminologies, and evokes some of the social/urban/political transformations that took place in Egypt over 50 years of its recent history.
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Iz Öztat and Ra, Boo Boo, 2022, video, 7 min., Turkey
In the ongoing body of work titled Every name in history is I and I is other, İz Öztat fabricates the (auto)biography of Zişan (1894-1970), who appears to her as a historical figure, a ghost, and an alter ego. She takes on Zişan’s archives and interprets them through her practice to propose a complex temporality where a suppressed past haunts an increasingly authoritarian present.
The chapter titled Boo Boo feeds off the research process that seeks to imagine the love affair between Zişan and Vita (Sackville-West), who meet in Istanbul, in 1913. While Zişan works at the photography studio of her father Dikran Bey, Vita comes in to have her photograph taken. They fall in love at first sight. During the one-year period when Vita lives in Istanbul, they spend time in the photography studio, imagining each other in the representations they produce, getting to know each other’s desires and documenting their love.
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Şükran Moral, Bordello, 1997, performance documentation, 8 min., Turkey
Bordello is a documentation of performance Şükran Moral did in 1997 in one of the small brothels in Istanbul. With self-confidence, she dons a nightgown and poses with a cigarette between red nails, offers herself for sale and uses this provocative gesture of self-determination to put off every potential client. At the same time she takes a small side-swipe at the art scene by renaming the establishment the Museum of Modern Art. In her works, which often take the form of performance art, Şükran Moral addresses traditional themes of emancipation art of the 1960s and 1970s and transposes them in a masterly fashion into the social structures of conservative and authoritarian systems. Şükran Moral's work also highlights how asynchronous social and cultural developments are.
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Deniz Pasha, Orientations, 2022, desktop-film, 15 min., Turkey
In this desktop-film, the Afro-Turkish artist, Deniz Pasha, together with her friends Jazmine Mussington and Mario Lamar, looks at the Western orientalist-style depictions of the Ottoman harem and visually analyzes the black people’s representations, who are mostly left in shadow, covered, and unidentifiable. On the computer screen page of Photoshop, as an act to nullify the racial degradation, she revises those representations with pictures of contemporary Black people living in Turkey.
![]()
Ardıl Yalınkılıç, The Gaze, 2018, video, 8 min., Netherlands
The Gaze is a video by the artist Ardıl Yalınkılıç based on a series of interviews he conducted in The Hague during his exchange study. He invited six white fellow art students from different European countries to participate in the interview and he asked them to answer his questions pretending to be himself. The only things they knew about Yalınkılıç were his name and that he came from Turkey. The final edit of the answers of the Western subjects imitating the non-Western one brings truths and seated cliches about the other altogether, with certain empathy but also an impenetrable gap in mutual understanding.
![]()
Nadir Sönmez, Boran, 2022, video-essay, 14 min., Turkey
Boran is a video work originally created for actor and director Nadir Sönmez's lecture performance titled "Diyarbakır.Tourism.Romanticism.Activism." Nadir Sönmez, an Istanbul-born and based artist, theater director, and actor, embarked on a journey to Diyarbakır with a European grant to delve into the recent local histories of the LGBTI+ struggle. During his exploration, he discovered Kurdish literature, engaging in conversations, romantic escapades, and extensive readings that inspired him to write essays and stories.
SELF-ORIENTATIONS
Screening: Saturday, January 13 at 3:00pm
Katarina Otto-Bernstein Screening Room, Lenfest Center for the Arts
615 West 129th Street, NY NY 10027
Presented by ArteEast in collaboration with the Columbia University’s Wallach Art Gallery in conjunction with the exhibition,
Partisans of the Nude: An Arab Art Genre in an Era of Contest, 1920-1960 curated by Kirsten Scheid.
SELF-ORIENTATIONS brings together artists from Turkey and Lebanon whose moving image works incorporate queer & feminist self-makings using, manipulating, and correcting the orientalist gaze, voluptuous fantasies, and perennial expectations from the oriental other. Curated by Alper Turan and conceived within the Partisans of the Nude: An Arab Art Genre in an Era of Contest, 1920 -1960 exhibition, SELF-ORIENTATIONS includes artists’ video, documentary, essay film, performance documentation, and desktop film by İz Öztat & Ra, Deniz Pasha, Şükran Moral, Nadir Sönmez, Ardıl Yalınkılıç and Akram Zaatari. This screening program flips the oriental lens reduced to passive imagery and objectification, bringing forth fervent narratives of libidinal energies, feminist audacities, queer storytelling and black revisionism of orients and orientations. Through the scenes from photography studios, Ottoman harem, İstanbul brothel to Amed streets, selected works vibrate the positions of the viewer and the viewed, exposed, and exposer, the urge to show and the need to hide the bodies.
The exhibition, Partisans of the Nude: An Arab Art Genre in an Era of Contest, 1920–1960, offers a unique perspective on the significance of nude art in former Ottoman territories transitioning into Arab identity. The exhibition defies both nationalist and Orientalist narratives by emphasizing the nude genre, often considered taboo and practically absent from Arab art production, and its role in shaping post-Ottoman societies and modern Islamic identity, during pivotal political shifts. On a parallel trajectory, diving deeper into the fringes of the nude genre and complementing the exhibition temporally and geographically, SELF-ORIENTATIONS brings forth contemporary artists from post-Ottoman Turkey who boldly employ their bodies and intimate moments as instruments of expression and critique.
Through these works, whether emanating from a sexual and racial critique, of queer desire, a daring semi-nude public appearance, or the sharing of deeply personal moments, the screening program introduces naked bodies, albeit not fully unclad but bald and exposed. Just as the nude genre in the Partisans of the Nude exhibition presents a narrative alternate to both nationalist and Orientalist discourses, the artists featured in SELF-ORIENTATIONS use moving images to reimagine self-representation and self/other dichotomies in the making of orients and orientations.
Central to this screening program’s discourse is the fascinating confluence of recreated or fictional photography studio scenes by Akram Zaatari and İz Öztat & Ra’s, both of whom employ the powerful setting of a photography studio as a locus of memory and self-representation. Akram Zaatari’s Her + Him bridges the realms of timeless photography and dynamic video, foregrounding a woman’s audacious embrace of her sensuality within the transformative socio-cultural milieu of Egypt and elegantly traversing between the stillness of photography and the fluid motion of video. Echoing this, İz Öztat and Ra’s Boo Boo offers an improvisational glance into queer desire, orientalist aesthetics, and the power of representation in forming selves. While Armenian-İstanbulite Zişan and British-expat Vita Sackville-West’s love story blossoms amidst the camera flashes, it also holds a mirror to the orientalist embellishments present in the photographic studios of early 20th-century Istanbul. In her 1997 performance Bordello, Şükran Moral boldly confronts the commodification of the female body by exposing herself in an Istanbul brothel, a site dating back to the Ottoman Empire. Through this act, she not only critiques societal views on women’s bodies but also challenges the art world’s tendencies. Her reclamation of the brothel as a modern art museum further merges the artist’s body with the broader narrative of female objectification.
Deniz Pasha’s Orientation provides a poignant revision in the form of a desktop film. Sudanese Turkish artist Pasha reclaims narratives, spotlighting the oft-overlooked black figures in art made in the Orientalist genre and connecting their silenced pasts to their vibrant, contemporary identities. She extracts black figures from the shadows of orientalist artworks and juxtaposes them with today’s Afro-Turks, thereby breaking the chains of racial degradation. Ardıl Yalınkılıç’s The Gaze brings us to contemporary European perceptions of Oriental stereotypes, exemplified in his interview video for which he asked his fellow art school students in the Netherlands to put themselves in his shoes, speculating, ‘‘Who is he?’’ as someone coming from Turkey. Unraveling the complexities of perception and inherent biases, Yalınkılıç highlights the vast chasm of understanding even amidst seemingly empathetic terrain. Concluding the program, Nadir Sönmez’s Boran unravels a complex triangle of desire, identity, and race distinctions from a queer lived experience. Part of a lecture performance by Sönmez, the essay video follows him as a Turkish artist from Istanbul in his research trip to Amed, Kurdish capital (Diyarbakır in Turkish), exposing the enduring power interplays of self and other, occident/orient, even within ultra-nationalist Turkey.
SELF-ORIENTATIONS is presented by ArteEast in collaboration with the Wallach Art Gallery as part of the legacy program Unpacking the ArteArchive, which preserves and presents 20 years of film and video programming by ArteEast. The film screening is curated by Alper Turan in conjunction with the Wallach Art Gallery exhibition, Partisans of the Nude: An Arab Art Genre in an Era of Contest, 1920-1960 curated by Kirsten Scheid.
PROGRAM
Akram Zaatari, Her + Him VAN LEO, 2001-2012, documentary, 33 min., Egypt / Lebanon
In 1998, Zaatari interviewed Egyptian photographer Van Leo in Cairo. In 2001 he made the video Her + Him Van Leo and based it on the story of a woman who once entered Studio Van Leo and asked the artist to take pictures of her naked. At the time, Zaatari had access to a few of the woman's twelve pictures. In 2010 Zaatari came across the entire series showing "Nadia" undressing in twelve poses and expanded the original work into this HD remastered version.
This documentary utilizes traditional portrait photography and video in a dialogue between two media: crafted black and white print, and the electronically colored and manipulated screen. This dialog comments on the transformations in art practices and terminologies, and evokes some of the social/urban/political transformations that took place in Egypt over 50 years of its recent history.
Iz Öztat and Ra, Boo Boo, 2022, video, 7 min., Turkey
In the ongoing body of work titled Every name in history is I and I is other, İz Öztat fabricates the (auto)biography of Zişan (1894-1970), who appears to her as a historical figure, a ghost, and an alter ego. She takes on Zişan’s archives and interprets them through her practice to propose a complex temporality where a suppressed past haunts an increasingly authoritarian present.
The chapter titled Boo Boo feeds off the research process that seeks to imagine the love affair between Zişan and Vita (Sackville-West), who meet in Istanbul, in 1913. While Zişan works at the photography studio of her father Dikran Bey, Vita comes in to have her photograph taken. They fall in love at first sight. During the one-year period when Vita lives in Istanbul, they spend time in the photography studio, imagining each other in the representations they produce, getting to know each other’s desires and documenting their love.
Şükran Moral, Bordello, 1997, performance documentation, 8 min., Turkey
Bordello is a documentation of performance Şükran Moral did in 1997 in one of the small brothels in Istanbul. With self-confidence, she dons a nightgown and poses with a cigarette between red nails, offers herself for sale and uses this provocative gesture of self-determination to put off every potential client. At the same time she takes a small side-swipe at the art scene by renaming the establishment the Museum of Modern Art. In her works, which often take the form of performance art, Şükran Moral addresses traditional themes of emancipation art of the 1960s and 1970s and transposes them in a masterly fashion into the social structures of conservative and authoritarian systems. Şükran Moral's work also highlights how asynchronous social and cultural developments are.
Deniz Pasha, Orientations, 2022, desktop-film, 15 min., Turkey
In this desktop-film, the Afro-Turkish artist, Deniz Pasha, together with her friends Jazmine Mussington and Mario Lamar, looks at the Western orientalist-style depictions of the Ottoman harem and visually analyzes the black people’s representations, who are mostly left in shadow, covered, and unidentifiable. On the computer screen page of Photoshop, as an act to nullify the racial degradation, she revises those representations with pictures of contemporary Black people living in Turkey.
Ardıl Yalınkılıç, The Gaze, 2018, video, 8 min., Netherlands
The Gaze is a video by the artist Ardıl Yalınkılıç based on a series of interviews he conducted in The Hague during his exchange study. He invited six white fellow art students from different European countries to participate in the interview and he asked them to answer his questions pretending to be himself. The only things they knew about Yalınkılıç were his name and that he came from Turkey. The final edit of the answers of the Western subjects imitating the non-Western one brings truths and seated cliches about the other altogether, with certain empathy but also an impenetrable gap in mutual understanding.
Nadir Sönmez, Boran, 2022, video-essay, 14 min., Turkey
Boran is a video work originally created for actor and director Nadir Sönmez's lecture performance titled "Diyarbakır.Tourism.Romanticism.Activism." Nadir Sönmez, an Istanbul-born and based artist, theater director, and actor, embarked on a journey to Diyarbakır with a European grant to delve into the recent local histories of the LGBTI+ struggle. During his exploration, he discovered Kurdish literature, engaging in conversations, romantic escapades, and extensive readings that inspired him to write essays and stories.