metin text
Nalan Yırtmaç was an active member of a group of young artists who managed to enunciate a post-punk scene in Istanbul in the first half of nineties.
Psychedelic iconographies and figures taken from urban subcultures, aesthetic references to local kitsch and the ironic use of low-tech media used to shape their activities based around music and these have recently been transposed to different modes of visual production.
Nalan Yırtmaç, whose formal painting formation in the fine art academy allowed her to focus on the visual dimension right from the start, has documented the quotidian adventures of this subcultural collective in a journal-like methodology.
Her simple and immediate painting techniques, such as stenciling and graffiti now adorn the back streets of the city centre and contribute to the ongoing critical struggle against the rapid sterilisation and gentrification of the core of the city.
In opposition to the local art scene that intensively employs representations, allegories and direct political references, Yırtmaç’s works remain insistently focused on the lightness of everyday life.
Some of her recent art works that touch the issues of political repression and the consequent violence permeating everyday life make use of the grotesque quality contained within the images published by the mainstream media.
Similar to the works of other artists sharing her subcultural formation, Yırtmaç’s practice appeals strategically to the variant iconographies of local popular culture, particularly to the imagery from the early years of cultural liberalisation and consumerism, starting in the fifties and extending into the sixties and seventies.)
A certain sense of parody mocks the awkwardness in them -melodramatic cinema, cheap action and sex films, Mediterranean music, posters of early divas, photo-novels, weekly pictorial magazines etc.
Nevertheless, Yırtmaç’s retro-style expresses sympathy to the relative innocence and primitive quality present in this material, clearly privileged over the mechanic, corporate spectacle boom produced by the turbo-capitalism of the last two decades of this country.
ERDEN KOSOVA 2006
