LEYLA GEDİZ

Vasif Kortun: I am trying to figure out how you choose, and why you choose to work with certain images. For example, you made a portrait of a young woman. Lara and Leyla: the painting worked as a collision between Lara, a suicide victim, and you, or some other woman of your family. The result, or ‘the end image', resembles a monochrome as the two identities melt further into one another. You have de-contextualized the image of Lara, and loaded your own memory onto it. Likewise, all the Kursk drawings, which you showed in the Istanbul Biennial, had single photograph as their starting point, yet each drawing was different from the other. They weren't permutations. Each one represented another man, and together, they made a ‘funerary chamber.'

Leyla Gediz: I agree with you on the portrait of a young woman (“Portrait” 2002). The making of that painting taught me how much of portraiture is a confrontation with your own self. Lara's suicide was in the papers, accompanied by a picture that showed her smiling. Her smile reminded me of an aphorism, one of many that I had memorized as a schoolgirl. I loved these short and witty sentences for their authority: they held ultimate truths. It did not matter where the quote came from, or who spoke it. The way to consume an aphorism is to make it your own dictum. The one that came to my mind was: ‘Smile when you wish to remain discreet.'

The Kursk drawings (“Atlantis” 2000, 2001) came before. There, the contrast stood between Dimitri Starosletsev's lonely eyes and the weight of a number, 118. You'll remember that once we had a conversation about spontaneity versus advance calculation. In “Atlantis” 2000, the parameters were set by Starosletsev's persistent gaze. ‘You'll get over it', they say. How many new faces does one have to get acquainted with, until one's mind is freed of the one face that's causing the pain? That was what I asked of my drawings. But I had to put a stop to this despair. So I completed 18 of them, and left it at that.

Vasif Kortun: When I think of painting today, painting exhibitions in particular, are they coming closer and closer to installation?

Leyla Gediz: To recall my exhibition, the whole show had this one-time-only feel to it, which almost exceeded the experience of each painting as unique. The sensation was more that they formed this singular constellation once and for all: a unique exhibition. Some considerable calculation goes into arranging paintings in any given situation. The use of the space in between is crucial. Those blank bits of wall, here and there, provide for the viewer a site for reflection. One begins either to see or imagine links between this and that painting until a single story crystallizes in the mind.

As we fall apart with modernist attitudes to painting, it may be necessary to be rid of the rigid term ‘painting exhibition.' Similar to the already existing expression ‘video installation,' but then, addressing painting as installation in general would be as vain as saying installation is painting.

(Excerpts from an interview, 2003)