2025
archival pigment print, screen print on glass
3 pieces; 103 x 78 cm / 40.6 x 30.7 in each (framed)
produced with the support of Arter
“Rehan Miskci’s practice weaves together layers of archive, photography, and text to reimagine traces lodged within both individual and collective memory. Her work forges permeable connections across different temporalities, proposing conceptual terrains shaped by unseen
encounters, potential affinities, and the overlapping surfaces of narratives. The works featured in the exhibition depict three women who shared the same home at different times. The first image features the artist's own mother, Suzan Sönmez; the second is the writer Suzan Sözen, who drew public attention for her controversial relationship with Adnan Menderes, one of Türkiye’s former presidents and a
significant figure in the country’s political history; and the third image corresponds to Iraida Barry, who fled Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and settled in Istanbul, becoming one of the first female sculptors of the Turkish Republic. These three women, though separated by time, all lived in the same house on Burgazada and turned to writing in different ways as a means of navigating the challenges they faced in their lives. In her large-scale prints, Miskci layers the piercing, intense gazes of these figures with texts drawn from each of them.
The archival photographs suggest a powerful intuition: that although these three women led very different lives, they might have experienced similar feelings as they now appear together in the same room for the first time. These works resonate with the thinking of Henri Bergson, who did not interpret time as a straight line but rather as a layered continuum. The past becomes visible as an intensity that accompanies the present. Miskci’s compositions, too, attune themselves to this density: they carry not only historical traces, but also their echoes and the residues that seep into the present. Through this approach, the artist transforms witnessing from a matter of representation into a field of interaction where different temporalities come into contact with one another.”
