Vienna based artist Nilbar Güreş' solo exhibition “Self-Defloration” on the 4th floor aims to display the diversity of her practice with a focus on a narrative approach to gender issues. She creates conceptual forms of filmic settings to produce photographic images, her narrative compositions are also transformed into collage, drawing and video. Her first solo project in Germany borrows its title from her collage work, “Self-Defloration” (2006). A female figure committing the act of self-defloration with an abstract form of reference to the third gaze is depicted standing as a personal statement to take control over her body instead of allowing a male figure to take ownership.
Welcoming the audience, the exhibition starts with an earlier video work entitled “Undressing” (2006), an artistic response to the European ‘Islamophobic’ gaze. The video performance is based on the oxymoronic relationship between undressing and veiling. Regarding how the image of the Muslim woman is instrumentalized in order to manipulate the masses by conservatives in the Post-9/11 era, it attributes diverse styles of veiling and many types of scarves to the names of the artist's friends and family members as an autobiographical form of narration. Güreş challenges the Western gaze with the expectation of a uniformed political identity associated with the preconceived meaning of scarf proposing rich Anatolian culture of textile and clothing style.
“Unknown Sports, Indoor Exercises” (2009) consists of three performances staged by the artist who worked with housewives in a gym. Considering cleaning the house, body care, make-up and house work as everyday exercises and the domestic space as an invisible territory of female identity, the artist creates a conceptual setting for understanding the unspeakable acts from a woman's world. Female practices such as body hair waxing, styling or vacuum cleaning have become their tools or weapons against male power and patriarchal dominance.
The “Çırçır” (2010) series 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 photographs represent fragmented moments of never-ending short stories depicting women in many scenes with references to her imaginative power and the local context. For instance, women singing together in “Gathering”, young girls believing in a common bright future in “Promise” are fictional characters with real references; also, the surrealist atmosphere of “Playing with a water gun” and the poetic staging of “Safine” are examples of how Güreş transforms theatricality into fiction with a performative approach.
The solo project “Self-Defloration” aims to present the diversity in Güreş' practice. In addition to her video works and photographic images, the exhibition includes recent collages and a presentation of her artistic research. Recent collage works - “The Flamingo and the Boy” (2011) and “Wrestling & Praying” (2011) - are based on non-narrative depictions of figures that are related with her fantasyland.
For this exhibition, Künstlerhaus Stuttgart has produced limited edition posters from the “TrabZONE” (2010) series. In this series, Güreş traces a geographic reality that is imprinted on her childhood memory with an instinct to re-visit Trabzon, an Anatolian city the artist used to visit in her childhood. In the recent video work “Wolf & Schaf” (2011), - shown for the first time in this exhibition - a little boy wearing a wolf mask is running after a girl with a lamb mask, they both imitate the animal sounds and reenact an old tale at night. Reflecting on her political position in response to the characteristics of traditional gender codes, Nilbar Güreş's solo exhibition focuses on female power, creates alternative narrative possibilities and reconstructs how we develop our gender and cultural identity.
Nilbar Güreş's project “Open Phone Booth” will be part of Frieze Frame (during Frieze Art Fair, London, 13-16 October 2011); the project is accompanied by a publication including a text by Adnan Yildiz. Nilbar Güres is represented by RAMPA Gallery Istanbul.
