Interview: Gül Kozacıoğlu
2016
The artist works with visual and aural media, utilizing photography in her exhibitions, installations and performances. Her work carries a wish to step above notions of space and time and often utilizes a visually fantastic language even in their dealings of subjects like crises, censorship and racism. Her work in process is an interactive light and dance performance and video installation, on the process of life, death and transformation, inspired and dedicated in part by the refugee waves and lives lost trying to pass across the Aegean Sea, where her studio in Bodrum is based since 2011.
There is always the aspect of time and continuity in your works, could you elaborate on this?
I am quite mermerised by the elasticity of time and space, or at least our perception of them, differing throughout the moments of our lives, in which time and space are not experienced by a constant, yet a state of fluctuation, which speeds up and slows down, widens and narrows, elongates or disappears, and the attempt of discovering/creating methods of relaying this experience, through visual, audial, or more situational art practices. Continuity emerges as a relation of our perception of time and space, also though the aspect of memory, and how we define a moment, and the relations of moments to each other.
left - Gül Kozacıoğlu, myndos & mnemonics III, diasec print, 60x90 cm, ed.. 5
right - Gül Kozacıoğlu, risen, diasec print, 60x40 cm, ed. 50
Printed’16 installation view
What is the importance of poems / words for you? Although your medium seems like photography, could you talk a little about the performative aspects of your works?
Most of my work starts with words. Something catches my attention, and as I start spinning around this thought, words, a concept, relations of concepts start to take shape. The poems are the thought structures of this process, when trying to understand. They are my dwelling upon a thought, a subject. Thus they give shape to the structure of the exhibition / performance. Photographs are elements of my work, the elements which are the most easily shared, and thus stand out. They are part of my sketching process, or part of the formation of a narrative, or the final documentation of an exhibition or performance.