Title: Self In Transit
Medium: Site-specific light and text installation
Year: 2020
'Self in Transit’ is a site-specific light and text installation by Tuğba Tirpan. Curated by Mustafa Boğa and hosted by Cable Depot (London/UK) the exhibition is looking at the ways in which we operate where matters of the mind are still a taboo and how language relates to it.
Language is a tool for communication but it can also be unobtrusively oppressive under social norms and social constructs of the time.
Self in Transit explores where language can operate within a framework of power, institutions and control.
Sometimes we need to look at things in a ‘different light’. This can enable us to see what might be going on under the facade of daily language and free ourselves from our predefined and sometimes self-imposed limits.
This intimate and personal work exposes the artist’s own psyche unfiltered as an emancipatory mediatory using language as a subversive tool. This work explores; self-policing, shame, cultural hegemony, individualism, psycho-politics, self-exploitation, the myth of *mental health* and other such issues experienced within our neoliberal societies.
Today’s language and narrative often instill the belief that we are the sole reason of our own unhappiness, depressions, miseries, failures, and confusions while concealing the systemic and systematic reasons.
'Let us remember the feminists who were once called ‘hysterical’ and incarcerated or the anti-colonial leaders who were called ‘terrorists’. Let us not only look at the language of the past and to be comfortable in the present but refocus the lens back on ourselves and the society in which we live.'
Artist Bio
Born in Ankara Turkey, 1984. Lives and works from London, UK. Tugba is an artist working in a range of media including performance, text, video, photography and installation. She often employs conceptual ways of working to challenge our pre-set thought patterns and structural forces that shape our cultural practices. She is interested in exploring language, power and control mechanisms, personal & political borders which often present themselves in the frameworks of taboos and restrictions in the society.