Aydan Murtezaoğlu
PILOT, 2001-2003

Aydan Murtezaoğlu is best known for her photographic work. Like Bülent Şangar (EB66 and EB68), the artist stages everyday life in Turkey in her photographs, with all its paradoxes, structural limitations, family relationships, and assigned gender roles.
The offset print PILOT, 2001–2003, Murtezaoğlu’s contribution to the graphic portfolio Love It or Leave It (EB66), shows a group of women standing in a circle on Kadıköy Port Square in Istanbul. On the left is the artist herself, whose modest clothing is reminiscent of an official civil servant. Opposite her stands a group of Romani girls, dressed in bright colors and swinging skirts. It remains unclear who the pilot is and thus who has the ability to navigate the situation. Murtezaoğlu’s work deals with the power of language and its influence on the meta-discourses that feed social codes and prejudices: “From ‘The Blackboard’ to ‘The Pilot’ […] my work tries to understand the meta-discourse, things that are managed in spite of other things, the language appropriating the speech in the name of others. And the interlocutor. That refers to an endeavor to understand how a world view massifies in a certain awareness, and how it remains and sticks as a meta-discourse.”¹
Text: Katrin Seemann

¹ Aydan Murtezaoğlu, in: Nataša Ilić, „An Interview with Aydan Murtezaoğlu“, attached in: Erden Kosova, Aydan Murtezaoğlu. Yakınlıklar Kaybolup Mesafeler Kapanırken / As Proximities Fade and Distances Disappear, Contemporary Art in Turkey 08, ed. by René Block, Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları 2009, p. 23.