Begüm Yamanlar Thresholds

In her practice, Yamanlar focuses on spaces with either collective or personal heaviness. She captures her shots when these spaces are about to vanish, when they are about to loose their daily functions and identities. Thanks to the ways she utilizes contemporary photography and video techniques, she builds up the spaces as they are rendered in people's memories, as opposed to how they actually seem. Yamanlar is after the togetherness of the past and present imaginations for various thick spaces, such as Atatürk Cultural Center in central Taksim that bears significance for collective memory or anonymous Non-places a la Augé, or personal places with particular family history.

Threshold is Yamanlar's first one-person exhibition that shows her work realized in different places and hence reveals the common structural quality in her artistic attention. The exhibition highlights the threshold points of the classical conceptual contrasts like construction vs. deconstruction, fiction vs. history, nature vs. culture and tries to express the unsteady and porous relations between these. The presentation of the works points to the changeable character of the threshold points and emphasizes that no absolute threshold is possible to locate oneself on. Yamanlar points to the permeable character of thresholds while raising awareness concerning the intentions for what is being shown and what is not. Hence she lets the thresholds to define themselves automatically, and renders a more prolific perception for reality.