[…] Something that reflects guts but neurons as well. Not refusing subjectification, asserting a point of view, taking a position through her images — these are Türkkan’s answers, and they are undoubtedly good ones. Whether Gözde Mimiko Türkkan is questioning the woman she is, or illustrating what women are today and how human relationships work, starting with female-male relationships as stereotyped as they are too strongly “gendered,” this young Turkish photographer does this both with the heart and with her head, too, combining imagery and consciousness, visuality and thought.
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PAUL ARDENNE
[…] In each of her exhibitions, while challenging material and moral boundaries, she worked as if she was preparing for a fight, more for pushing her own boundaries than for the sake of the viewer. For this reason the exhibitions, built on the heritage of the previous ones, became a road map that shed light on Gözde’s life, especially when read and interpreted together. After her series of Polaroids entitled “Gratitude” documenting the last days of her grandmother, she felt the responsibility for exposing another person in a defenseless way. As a method of reckoning with herself and perhaps forgiving herself, she took a series of erotic self-portraits questioning a woman’s own self-image through (Venus) Pudica’s posture.
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YASEMIN ELÇİ
[…] In her new body of work Wish Tree this state of being travels to a new destination. The series juxtaposes the essence of the “other”, both in terms of nationality, culture, beliefs; confronting the audience with the mundanity of daily life where this state causes alienation and a sort of dismissal. However much we may have gone forward from a time of heightened biasedness, racism and xenophobia we still have not moved forward from the need to mark and or separate ourselves from the “foreigner”; The blond is dumb, the Turk a barbarian, the Japanese are all perverts, etc. etc. In Wish Tree, Gözde Mimiko Türkkan doesn’t divide but brings together these different states of being.
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İPEK ÇINAR
[…] If we assume that the artist’s works are portraits, do these situational portraits expose a profession, a way of making money rather than people? How authentic can the representation a photographer produces be when he or she enters a profession he/she does not normally carry out? The reason for the manifestation of these questions is Türkkan’s humble visuality due to its complexity; perhaps the only point that an article on portrait could possibly reach is what Türkkan’s works have flung in my face, when a portrait is an abuse, when a document, when it is a comforting element that connects the subject and the viewer, that bring closer together.
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MERVE ÜNSAL
[…] Narcissism this time ceases to have the self as a center of interest to move to the other. The result is a distorted perception of this self that manages to be subdued only in part by the mediation of photography, that ends up becoming a sort of psychoanalysis. The intimacy quit the private sphere to becomes a means of aggression, fighting, a martial art capable of hitting straight to the bowels.
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SANTI OLIVERI
[…] The success of Türkkan’s collected works does not rely in the fact that they try answer these questions, but that they give us enough raw material to form our own thoughts. We are left to our own devices, Türkkan does her best to come to us unbound. Her lens turns both inwards and outwards. She is the prey and the hunter.
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