Nilbar Güreş
9 April–21 May 2011
Şair Nedim Caddesi No: 21a
Akaretler, Beşiktaş
Istanbul, Turkey
T +90 212 327 0800
F +90 212 327 0801
info [at] rampaistanbul.com
Rampa is hosting the Nilbar Güreş exhibition between April 9 and May 21, 2011
Nilbar Güreş, who lives and works in Vienna, builds her image production on a performative approach and cultural observation. Her works are molded around gender, composition of conceptual space and narrative presentation and transformed into forms such as photography, collage, drawing and video.
In the “TrabZONE” (2010) series, with an instinct to re-look at Trabzon, Güreş traces a geographic reality that is imprinted on her child-memory. The “Çırçır” (2010) series, exhibited at the 6th Berlin Biennial, takes place in a neighborhood confiscated by the state in Istanbul, undergoing a problematic urban transformation. Women who live in a migrant culture dominated by a patriarchal structure are re-liberated as they stir up our collective consciousness in these open-ended scripts where they play the lead.
The video performance “Undressing“, which is a response to the image of women produced the ‘Islamophobic’ gaze of Europe, and the collage “Self-Defloration,” are other works in which Güreş—who defines herself as a “cultural empiricist/researcher”—plays with codes of gender and culture. The 2006 dated “Undressing” emerged as a response to the growing islamophobia in the West, especially in the post 9/11 era; and the image of the Muslim women consumed by the radical right political parties in Europe, leaving this image devoid of identity. The video functions as a reverse analogy. Depicting veiling through undressing, the patterns of the fabric also incorporate a biographic element to the work with the different forms of putting on the veil and how it is personalized by the person it belongs to.
