Exhibition at FASS Art Gallery: Dual Citizenship (by Deniz Ezgi Sürek)

Dual Citizenship

17-28^th December 2018 / FASS Art Gallery

In her book, called “Illness as Metaphor”, Susan Sontag describes illness as: “Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place”.

This description of Sontag is inspirational for the exhibition, because even though people who have no disability, illness or flaw at all, will have one eventually. So, even though it is certain that every human being will be faced to be ill or disable at some point in their lives, a disabled body still is the reason for further attention or repulsion. The body as a notion is a substantial part of this exhibition, and how the body is represented or positioned plays a part for the compositions. The idea that the body is an uncompleted subject is the core of the exhibition. The output consists of photographs of bodies that are reconstructed and located in a natural habitat. By this work, it is intended to represent what is extraordinary and uncanny as something ordinary and familiar.