Nilbar Güreş
Nilbar Güreş is a painter, photographer, and sculptor as well as a video and performance artist who deals with the body in its broadest sense. She relates the human figure to the social and gendered contexts by which it becomes marked and defined. With a lucid eye for the symbolic in the everyday and a vast knowledge and appreciation of the artisanal and material culture of Turkey, her country of origin, Güreş confronts questions of cultural identities as well as of concomitant and essentially patriarchal social and political norms by inventing subversive scenarios as part of a highly sensual and
provocative stance that makes the so-called private a public issue. Güreş collaborates with people (mainly women) to stage photographic scenarios while also engaging with the circumstances of their everyday lives in order to transcend the seemingly profane with the highest degree of artistic precision while at the same time negotiating structural issues. Her inventive scenarios and narratives are ambiguous, often being witty but with a tragic or melancholic underside. In her work generally, and even more so in her recent sculptures and paintings, a culture of myths shines through—myths arisen from the psycho-geography of the space from which she comes, with its thousand years of irrefutable history. Güreş is a visual poet who reverses these myths in her partisan engagement with regard to emancipatory, feminist, and queer issues. And in this sense, her works also embody political allegories of a society amidst a changing world. S.E.
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