Photography and video are inherently personal for me: I connect and converse with my family through them. This is a fundamental act because there are voices in my mind that are sometimes difficult to say out loud.
During my New Year’s holiday in Turkey, I connected with my family. I’ve used the visual and audio recordings of this conversation to create a visual story about my mother. When I arrived in Turkey, I saw that her delicate body had melted from prolonged diseases. As her main caregiver, I am responsible for her health and well-being, so I brought her to the hospital. After I admitted her I captured photos and created a video in her room while I looked after her, sleeping for two weeks in a tiny wheelchair.I made this series because I was living day in and day out within this small space, facing love and hate, fate and ambiguity.
I was fighting discrimination, which I show myself openly criticizing some parts of this piece. I know I have no right to ambush my viewer with grief, with the very distillation of sadness. I argue for the right to look away, and the right not to. Because it was based on a model rolling on the still life photographs there is my mother and, signifying vulnerability and helplessness, and possibly the end of life.
Completing this video are four photographs made at the public hospital, which depict patient’s rooms, dirty windows, common area seats, wheelchairs, and waiting rooms to represent the vulnerability in the unseen patient room. I secretly captured my images with dark humor at night. I enhanced them with a fascination is conversely having opened doors, but closed windows and wheeled chairs.
Our society goes around saying “it is what it is”. We might seem to be a society that accepts and even relishes a world in which the patient’s wheelchair can be caregiver’s seats and beds, a medical world ripening with possibilities. The six photos accompanying the video consist of the images of the university hospital where Tayyip Erdogan abandoned his financial support, punishing academics and medical doctors who opposed seventeen years of his dictatorship.
However, aside from the elderly, the poor and secular-minded citizens who are hit by these political games, it does not change the fact that life will someday end for all of us.
However, aside from the elderly, the poor and secular-minded citizens who are hit by these political games, it does not change the fact that life will someday end for all of us.
