SEÇİL YERSEL

Istanbul is the city of the horizontal, said Le Corbusier, counter-posing the architectural texture of the ancient city he was favouring to the ahistorical verticalities of New York . The string of domes outlining the arabesque of Consantinople, the interplay between the three geographic parts of the city and the seaways of Bosporus dividing them justify this story of visual characterization. The ascribed quality of timelessness deduced from this horizontal expanse, however, brings in the stereotypes produced by the discourse of historical Orientalism. Combined with the overused cliché of the city's silence, the horizontality referred transformed o cultural particularity into an object of contemplation, the contrived sublimation of the Other.

Seçil Yersel's photographs employ both of the qualities, the horizontal and the silent, for different purposes. Their panoramic perspective operates rather as a defensive reaction of a resident of the city to the hectic, loud and aggressive energies of a megalopolis. The use of the wide angle is a reflection of the attempt of the individual to make sense of his/her dynamic, and sometimes defunct, surrounding-an attempt to recognize his/her implication in the midst of a slippery urban texture that keeps him/her in a constant displacement. This effort produces a paradoxical consequence in which the individual hat to distance him/herself from the environment s/he is willing to recognize visually, and in which the surrounding space appears like withdrawing, escaping into itself. The effect of caesura in Yersel's pictures is experienced both by the gazer who controls the shutter and by the figures to be seen in her photographs: commuters waiting in the mouldy train stations of the Istanbul hinterland: an excavating vehicle left in the middle of a muddy construction field, probably after the time-off; streets deserted after midnight: a ferryboat in the process of boarding: empty ports during a snow storm; a wrecked ship in the coast waiting to be disintegrated-a state of physical or mental halt on locations or vehicles of mobility, in general.

In a recent series of photographs Yersel focuses on the daily life of her grandmother. Considering the encircling high-rises that can be seen from the window flat that the pictures are taken in should be located in a rather modern neighborhood in Istanbul . The interior plan of it is apparently designed for young married couples from the middle class, rather than a single old lady. Be it for the provincial experience of the grandma and/or her age, the allocation of her belongings in the flat reveals an unfitting feeling. The distance between the interior design constructed by cheap social engineering of an opportunist industry and the lived space can be detected in the empty-looking rooms. We find a whole wall decorated merely with the photograph of the deceased husband, spare beds kept for infrequent guests, provisional sun bed placed onto the dinner table in the living room, and so on. In this series, Yersel extends her take on the tension between the excruciating hyper-speed of Istanbul and its shelter-seeking residents into the interior space, and she exhibits the active search of the excluded ones for creating resistant rhythms and spaces of their own.

(Erden Kosava)