Blank Space
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- Blank Space
- 2019
- satin, synthetic leather, embroidery; two parts, each 245 x 74 cm
“Blank Space” is an architectural element connecting two spaces. Consisting of two parts, it is in equal measures a double door and a curtain, and it allows people to pass through. One side is made of shiny, salmon-pink satin and resembles the typical heavy quilt used in Turkish homes that features as an essential element of a woman’s traditional dowry. The soft and alluring surface of this quilt-like material strongly evokes the body’s sensuality and intimacy as well as its fleshy internal structures. The reverse side reveals imitation leather in the color of light skin, a reference to the body’s exterior. On both sides of this curtain-like leather surface and in proportional relation to the human figure, Güreş has placed a nipple formed of light-colored fabric and sewn on by hand. Below the two nipples, however, the “skin” has been cut and partly removed to leave two large and prominent crescent-shaped openings. These “wounds” have been roughly sutured using thick black thread that resembles vertical bars and reveals what is underneath: pink fabric that exhibits a children’s pattern, something like a cute yellow chick that has just hatched. In the area between the nipples, some improbable-seeming new stubble has grown—realized as setaceous black thread stitched through the leather. “Blank Space” is about a trans man whose breasts have been removed. Güreş chose the underlying image of the newly hatched chick to symbolize the birth of a person who has arrived in his correct and desired identity. But Blank Space is also as ambivalent as the title itself. It is about more than just the trauma of this personal transition, indeed touching on the subcutaneous vulnerability of the (gendered) body in general. S.E.