Barikat series: 60x92 cm, silkscreen and multiple plate photo etching on paper, 2014
Incursions series: 35x25 cm, silkscreen and photo etching on paper, 2014
In June, 2013, a small sit in to save Taksim Gezi Parkı, a central city park in Istanbul, from redevelopment spiralled into the largest scale civil unrest Turkey had seen in decades. Forceful police actions in evicting the peaceful demonstrators served as a flash point and brought millions into the streets to protest diverse concerns from Turkey's diminishing freedom of the press, expression and assembly, to government encroachment into civil life. Like many of my Turkish friends, I went to Gezi to denounce recent police and government actions, to disrupt business-as-usual, but also to search for the spark of something more hopeful. The first few frantic days of the uprising generated the dramatic imagery seen around the world of clouds of tear gas enveloping the heart of Istanbul, but while the foreign cameras and media attention soon left, the tear gas lingered.
The imagery for this body of work comes from photographs I took of barricades on the streets of Istanbul during the Gezi protests, and scenes from my apartment in Kadıköy, an Istanbul neighbourhood that was the site of many demonstrations. They were completed thanks to a 2014 residency award by Belfast Print Workshop, and exhibited there in the show Rituals of Dissent. These works are, in part, an attempt to reconcile the emotional fervour and hopeful enthusiasm of those first days of unrest in Taksim Square, with the indecisive outcome of the demonstrations, while seeking to understand my own relationship to these events as a supportive witness, but outsider.