ART CITIES: Instabul-İz Öztat

İz Öztat’s practice engages with diverse forms and media defined by her research. Her individual and collective artistic practice focuses on the return of the suppressed past in the present, questioning official narratives through the possibilities of fiction, struggles for water to flow free, the influence of education in constructing the artist and consensual negotiation of power relations.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Zilberman Gallery

İz Öztat’s in her solo exhibition “Underbelly”, brings together a selection of works produced by the artist within the past ten years alongside an (auto)biographical narrative. Since 2010, İz Öztat has been engaged in an untimely collaboration with Zişan (1894-1970), who appears to the artist as a historical figure, a ghost and an alter ego. In their collaboration, they address official histories, artist myths, as well as the myriad dynamics that inform art historical canons. As part of this ongoing body of work titled “Every name in history is I and I is othe”r, Öztat embraces the power of fiction to temper life, employing methodologies that propose multiple selves, contradicting and fragmented narratives. The exhibition reveals the (auto)biographical layers that inform the creation of two chapters; “Boo Boo”, which focuses on the love affair between Zişan and Vita that transpired in Istanbul in 1913, and “Dead Reckoning to Her Folds”, which revolves around sculptures to propose a narrative on queer desire and immigration. In “Danube as Biography: Reduced and Simplified”, Öztat departs from a historical depiction of the Danube on a military map and references Zişan’s journey along the river in 1915, as she fled from Istanbul to Berlin. The ruptured flow of the red line that spans the gallery walls, is accompanied by a text titled “Would You Miss Me If I Disappeared?” which chronicles the friendship and love between two women. The work touches the complex connections that lie at the underbelly of artistic process and mother-daughter relationships. The chapter titled “Dead Reckoning to Her Folds” correlates the struggle of making way in the absence of guiding and anchoring reference points to the experiences of artistic production, falling in love as well as immigration. In these works, Öztat locates sculpture as an object of queer desire and problematizes the figurative and normative depictions of the female body. The artist works with feelings of desire, loss, and longing by upholding a stark tension between the horizontal forms she has created using soft, permeable, and loose materials and the vertical forms comprised of rigid elements.

Photo: İz Öztat, Danube as Biography: Reduced and Simplified, 2023, Acrylic paint on wall, Dimensions variable, © İz Öztat, Courtesy the artist and Zilberman Gallery

Info: Zilberman Gallery, İstiklal Cad. No.163 Mısır Apartmanı K.3 D.10, Beyoğlu / Istanbul, Turkey, Duration: 25/2-26/4/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.zilbermangallery.com/