Gonca Sezer

Sezer completed her post graduate study atthe Painting Department of Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University. (1986)

In 2002, Sezer was awarded scholarship by the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and so had an opportunity to work at the Virginia University.

The artist held her first exhibition in 1988.The exhibitions; ‘Eye-Witness’ at Dirimart Art Gallery (2003), ‘Hand’ (2008), ‘Education’ (2009) and ‘Memory Palace’ (2010) at ARTIK mekan are amongst her solo shows.

She has internationally participated in exhibitions in Bulgaria, South Korea, China, Poland and Germany.

Making use of various means such as drawings, photography and daily materials, GoncaSezer creates installations, performances and interventions. The artist who has an art painting background, comments on the diversity of her work as being the reflection of visual memory on her art.

In her works of thematic variety;gender, violence and memory are some of the subjects highlighted by the artist.

In the ‘Istanbul Off Spaces’ exhibition that has taken place in Berlin in 2009, Sezer has concentrated on matters such asthe relationship of the woman as an individual with the city, her presence in daily life and several social roles at tributed to women.

The artist relating social traumas to figures and three-dimensional objects, in her exhibition ‘About Deserted Places’, says the following : “I have worked on the social traumas of our day, by fictionalizing them through children, women and objects. In this series that I have created out of figures and objects, children and women are gathered under the title ‘status quo’. My three dimensional objects named ‘bureaucrats’ were included in this ironic project as well. Frog bureaucrats and parts I’ve gilded, are destructive, rapidly multiplying beings that consume up everything and far from reflecting the problems, the demands of the public, blessed in their ‘appointed’ state, solely rest in their institutions where they are considered as valuable as gold. The Forget Me Not flower on the other hand, with its ordinary yet interesting definition dating back to centuries, supports the discourse of my exhibition.

SPECIES-HUMAN: BABIES OF BIO-POLITICS

xamining Gonca Sezer’sworks, we can easily see examples of political economy that Foucault has thought in terms ofthe ‘species-human’. What Gonca Sezer is concerned about, is to question how power economically and genetically reproduceslife.

How does massified control, link to and join individualized power? It seems that in Gonca Sezer’s photography and designs, the endeavoritself, is to present the image of babies that have been born and exist in life as individuals, but have been put together into packages and turned intoindistinctive uniformsby the power as if they were the soldiers of the future.

These last works of Gonca Sezer show that despite her background of painture tradition, the artist reaches out for different media,  instruments and materials; yetin doing so, still reminds us that she continues to add into her work, components of painting through her designs, without pursuing any hierarchy among them. Contemporary language deals with these media at the same time, makes use of them all and rejects an evolutionary transition.

Ali Akay 2004