irem s.

Selected reviews

turnaround 

A young woman by the window is looking at the baby that she is holding in her arms, smiling. The baby is gazing the sky, the clothesline is holding the cloth. The roots are holding the tree, the branches are holding the leaves.

And the past is holding today.

In turnaround, Irem Sozen analyses a period by the way of merging some photographs she found in the old family albums, that both she and her family members had taken, with her personal registers. She carries out a mental excava- tion as an act of afterlooking, starting with the piling up of the memory that deviates the chronology; and then leaping back and forward without an index.

Among these documents that we call personal register, the large amount of the portraits that belong to the characters she acquainted with, shows that in fact, the memory does not only leap through time but also through the subjects. We are witnessing that the shareholders of the common history based on affinity, possess, or even more, hold onto the history of another; even if it is worth to blur the memories that an individual endowed to himself/herself. Where does affinity begin and end? How much is the solitude in the state of photographing essential? How much does it nourish itself by another or how much is it under its siege?

One may simply notice the influence of this intersubjectivity on Irem’s look to the nature, and in this nonfiction narrative, the fragments of people that she caught without any concern of grasping, become the silent defenders of the intimacy of her language. The small, though intense, observation universe of childhood, that is composed of family members, protects its simplicity and naivety despite of the diverseness and complexity that womanhood brings, and this aspect renders the intimacy both possible and surprising. Another surprising part is that the autoportraits give the opportunity to make believe that the photographer subject can be just another character of whatsoever affinity.

In the spiral fiction of exhibiting, in three; blue, white and black stages, we are looking at the same direction regardless of the diversity of cameras, themes and forms: getting close to someone hoping subconsciously to find or to give adjectives to oneself, getting away from oneself in himself/ herself and then getting close to oneself by getting away from him/her; embracing, holding and abandoning; missing and retrieving. 

And before I forget, the fact that the past controls today remotely. 

Ilgın Deniz Akseloğlu

January 2015