Witness

Exhibition:
Internal/External
Simbart Projects
20.01 2021 – 05.03.2021

The artist, who recently started to tour Ülker Street in a different way using Google Maps, records the plant photographs he has collected as a result of his virtual strolls; the testimonies of other species are thus recorded and he transforms these testimonies into postcards, specifying his own position as that of someone holding the testimonies. Öztekin employs photography not as a tool of narration, but as a conductive litmus paper; he highlights that instead of the flawed memory of photography, plants can and should testify.

The foundations of Öztekin’s painterly efforts are grounded in a sensibility that is defined by political and social circumstances as well as resistance movements. In the artist’s works, spaces that have been crucial to the history of LGBTI+ resistance, stains, remnants, the absent, the undernarrated, the unseen are transformed into objects of memory to make another form of narration possible.

Furkan Öztekin, Witness, Postcard and Photograph, 27.5 x 37.5.cm, 2021 (Photos: Kayhan Kaygusuz)

1st & 2nd Photo Credit: Kayhan Kaygusuz (Internal/External, Simbart Projects, 2021)