Places You Haven’t Been
2017
2017
archival pigment prints
58 x 50 inches
“Rehan Miskci’s work often grapples with subjects like the minority experience, lacking a sense of belonging and the loss of memory. Places You Haven’t Been is a photo collage that began with the artist’s discovery of a studio photograph of her father taken in Istanbul in 1959 by Maryam Şahinyan, Turkey’s first female studio photographer. In Places You Haven’t Been, this photograph is divided into two parts between which are set a panel, forming a triptych. All the nostalgic sentiments and distinctive elements of traditional photo studios such as lighting, equipment and backdrops – which have now given way to digital photography – point to the far-reaching social and cultural changes that societies have undergone. By pushing the photograph into an undefined space, the work references changing perceptions and spatial fantasies about the studio itself. The triptych also serves as an introduction to her other work in the exhibition, Mountain of Foto Yeraz.”Excerpt from the exhibition catalogue “Don’t Look Back Deep Is the Past” at Odunpazarı Modern Museum
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As much as this work is an invite to think about photography studios as rooms that collected infinite stories, it also stands for a personal separation, a record of a lost possibility.