Artist talk: Erkan Özgen

Conversation with

14 jun 2007

Erkan Özgen Born 1971 in Derik, Mardin, Turkey, is an important exponent of the contemporary art scenes
in Diyarbakir and Istanbul which developed throughout the mid-nineties till today.

With:

Images that I have been struggling to fix in the frame of my psyche, my toil of maintaining the tracks that make me bleed in my brain and ego and metaphors that cause me to perceive their own gravity in my photo or video works being reflected by the language of art; they all emerge as an interference of an individual coming from an oppressed land and speaking in the language of art, who is laboring hard in order to go beyond the prohibitions, or at least to open a crevice in the screen of prohibitions and constraints. Those aforementioned metaphors are the systematic blasts of a land thick with mines that are trying to command the human memory, keep on blasting one after an other, turn into diverse forms and may appear every time and everywhere. Through these blasts; we see that the split-up of an identity, post traumatic expressions, resistance focals of a culture that had been externalized, reduced to the secondary extent, damned and wasted emerge together with the art performance. I consider that it shall not be wrong to interpret my long video work titled Welat (Land) as ?the expression of socio psychological delirium?

On the other hand, the children in my work called Adult Games who are wearing hoods and are the actors of the play, in whose foreheads is written 'born to be terrorist', are the Kurdish children with guerrilla identity, whom 'the apparent state' is struggling to assimilate, has always been spending a great effort to estrange them to their own culture through the compulsory education and in response to this fact they have made their land a field of resistance, they give an answer to the play of power through the attack of a minor play. Besides this, my aspiration with my work titled Lost Body, which can also be interpreted as the decipher of a play installed in a play, is to make ones think that, its realization degree doesn't matter, the denial of an invented form within which some are toiling to manipulate, intimidate and annihilate an individual and a society by means of an intellectual reaction, is possible, too; but while doing this, my goal is not to present a perspective, only to share my perspective.