Nilbar Güreş

Unknown sports are the ones practised by women to survive the daily erosion of possibilities, the infinite obstacles that a deeply male chauvinist society has produced over the millennia. 

The ironic and at times comic verve is vivid and unequivocal. For modern Goddesses Kali of the thousand arms, a fitness workout is not understood as the process of mortifying the body to which many submit in order to approach ideal models of plasticized femininity: rather it is the Olympic ability to conjugate identities, expectations, commitments and roles day after day. Unknown Sports, like many other works by this Turkish artist, needs no special subtitles. It speaks an iconic language that is immediate, although stylistically beyond criticism. Public exhibition, accentuated theatricality, soap opera excess (it’s the same story ladies, but told by more protagonists) creates a tableau vivant in which everyday femininity is posing, real and tangible. The unknown space evoked in the title, and which becomes public, extended, surreal, is the stone guest which takes the role of ripped away drape that inevitably displays something normally intended to be concealed behind the curtain. 

We should not be deceived by Güreş’ versatility in employing photography, drawing, video and collage. The point of view is focalised, concentrated, and the poetics coherent. The propulsive centre of her multiform work – which has taken her in a short time to a qualitatively significant presence at international level – is the deconstruction of commonplaces, of stereotypes and of the codified maps that define political, cultural and gender-related identities. From her performance interventions, in which she takes direct actions, to her drawing, the vulnerability of social masks is the imaginary centre of this artist’s research. Through “the grammar of irony and of involuntary comicality,” writes Başak Şenova, she underscores “the brutality of life.” In this scrutinizing from a wilfully narrow keyhole there is neither moralism nor preconception. Rather a tragic farce in which it is always possible to fall into the whirlpool of the comic, understood in the Pirandello sense as “awareness of the contrary”, which is to say as contrast between appearance and reality. The appearance and the embalmed codification transmitted to us of the female image in the world of Islamic and in particular Turkish tradition, is completely overturned here, making us part of a femininity which belongs to us inasmuch as we are women who are revealed in their shared condition of subordination, but at the same time of Olympic athletes of destiny.