In my work “I can now camouflage myself as an academic,” I reveal familiar gestures, touches, symbols, and interiors from my own family archive and the current living spaces of my family members. After months of looking at my family’s archive material and listening to the plural voices in it, I began to search for my own body, my own history in it. It was not only a search in the past, but also a locating in the present. I placed my body in the relationships and spaces. My search had different levels: portraits with the self-timer, still lifes from the present, and excerpts from the archive material that I selected. These act as a bridge between times and the understanding of one’s own position within the family, but also within the social system. I use remote control to make the power dynamics of the medium visible in the image. No one but the person portrayed is present in the room: the gaze goes out to the viewers, it demands.
Aslı Özdemir
I am an interdisciplinary visual artist whose practice operates at the intersection of intergenerational memory, empowerment, and a critical examination of the self in private and public spaces. I understand care—emek in Turkish—as both a political and aesthetic practice: a form of resistance, labor, and memory.
Photography is my primary medium, which I use as a means of intervention and re-inscription. Working with my family archive, I explore gestures, touches, and everyday objects as traces of embodied history. By cropping, enlarging, and rearranging these fragments, I fill in the gaps to reframe marginalized bodies and
relationships as active subjects.
Alongside this, I create intermedial spatial installations, performances, and literary works that interweave photographic and bodily memory.
My photographic language oscillates between documentation and staging. Using luminous, symbol-rich still lifes as well self- and family portraits, I examine habitus as an inscription of history—as continuity, repetition, and ruptures. In my portraits, I work with remote control, thus referring to a queer feminist canon that critically questions the medium on the level of the image.
