CANSU YILDIRAN - THE DISPOSSESSED
Such is how Cansu Yıldıran begins conveying both the biographical and social background of The Dispossessed, as if telling the first lines of a fairy tale. In fact, this fairy-tale language may seem very much appropriate, at first glance, in order to depict the artist's highland homeland, which they have visited every summer since their childhood after their family emigrated many years ago. With their camera pointed at Kuşmer, the place where their extended family, distant relatives and neighbours, plants, animals, orchards, trees, houses and their own childhood reside, Yıldıran attempts to make sense of life on the highland, and their own place within it. These photographs, which they took in Kuşmer, where their family does not possess even the slightest planted tree, tell the story of how women, animals and the land itself come to grips with the forces of dispossession, leaning on patriarchy and the institution that is private property. Thus, Yıldıran's gaze turns the highland into a disquieted landscape, and the human and non-human creatures that live there into grotesque bodies. Faces shining for only a brief moment when the flash goes off into the darkness of night, and bodies bent and twisted out of shape amid the rugged landscape, steer our gaze towards Yıldıran's personal nomadic history.
Yıldıran turns their gaze towards the daily life of women, plants and animals who live under this masculine property law. In doing so, they seek to find out what else women dispossessed and animals put to work by patriarchy, private property, the market and the State all working hand-in-hand, can do apart from acquiring property on a land that has been put under the yoke. Between the cattle and humans, appearing so intertwined as to have become indistinguishable from one another, clipped animal hides, which have merged with the grass, and women's bodies, disfigured by years of bending over the soil, something like an alliance is formed. This common existence heralds the nearing day when the perpetrators of dispossession themselves will be dispossessed, and the tide will eventually turn: that day will come, the day of the women, and other living beings, who pray, tend to gardens, care for animals, and collect immortelle flowers.
(excerpt from the 'Blossoms of Farewell' exhibition text by Begüm Özden Fırat and Ayça Yüksel, 2024)
