This Picture Collection by Olgaç Bozalp Is a Considerate Meditation on Migration
In his first UK solo exhibition and picture e book, House: Leaving One For One other, the Turkish photographer considers the expertise of motion
Within the context of our discursive and globalised world, maybe the one immutable fixed is motion. For some, motion gives alternative, self-expression and revenue. For others, motion is pressured, harmful and everlasting. In his first UK solo exhibition and picture e book House: Leaving One For One other, Turkish photographer Olgaç Bozalp demonstrates how in each circumstances, a journey is endured; all the time pushed by the promise of a brand new life.
“I like unexpectancy with my work,” Bozalp tells AnOther, “I prefer to problem the attitude of individuals.”
In a combination of staged and documentary pictures, Bozalp’s topics narrate tales of migration via visible metaphors that pose questions, not solutions. Televisions lament static in entrance of a veiled determine, an eerie sculpture of life jackets stands on a cloudy seaside whereas a girl drowns in a fish tank. The photographs are primarily ambiguous; Bozalp manages to evoke somewhat than transmit that means – a testomony to his distinctive follow.
A putting element in House: Leaving One For One other is the absence of human faces. “If you watch it (migration) on the information, it’s by no means about particular person identification, they’re faceless,” Bozalp explains. This deliberate omission is a criticism towards the determine of the migrant within the media, who is often portrayed not as a person human being, however as a disembodied phantom. Extra putting, is how in Bozalp’s pictures, regardless of the absence of face, the migrant has by no means been extra clearly thought-about and revered as a person.
“Travelling in Asia, I bought actually impressed by the way in which individuals used the bike, individuals sit on them, even total households, to get from one place to a different,” he says. “That rang a bell in my memory that even in case you don’t have a roof over your head, the bike will be house.” That includes nearly as ceaselessly as human topics, inanimate motorbikes turn out to be characters themselves. They pose adorned in crimson and white sunflowers or in sharp distinction, shoulder the burden of knotted sub-machine weapons. On the one hand the motorbikes, “characterize the place you wish to go, the place you wish to be,” and the transience of house in transmigration. On the opposite, they communicate to the pervasiveness of transport, which might take life as simply because it facilitates it.
In the same vein, Bozalp expresses how in each occasion of migration materials traces are sometimes left. “I feel individuals all the time connect to issues, it’s a illustration of their previous. That’s why I all the time {photograph} plenty of the stuff left behind, I’m all the time hooked up to that,” he says. Certainly, tethering a lot of Bozalp’s work collectively is a considerate investigation into our relationship with the inanimate world. From a crumbling home in Uzbekistan to a ruined bus seat stranded on the crimson cliffs of Wadi Rum, this particles – left earlier than or throughout transit – carries mnemonic significance, representing the markers of a once-there human presence.
A migrant himself, the mission is as deeply private as it’s political. “My private expertise is that I simply didn’t really feel like match to the place I used to be born,” he says. “I needed to grasp my aspect of the story, why I needed to maneuver out, what was the motivation.” Numbered textual content on the e book’s cowl and alongside the exhibition’s storefront in east London recall Bozalp’s childhood spent in his hometown of Konya, Turkey. They learn like a journal entry, capturing Bozalp’s youthful angst from feeling the house he was dealt was not the place he belonged.
Pictures turn out to be conduits for Bozalps personal recollections. For instance, in a single portrait, a girl friends out of a window, her silhouette lined by lace curtains, “each time I am going and go away, they (his household) go behind the scenes … after which they wave at me, that freezes in my reminiscence.” In his intimate recollections, Bozalp captures the impulsive emotions of not belonging and wanting to maneuver. But additionally, the bittersweet moments that include any departure: the goodbyes, the recollections and the longing.
House: Leaving One For One other by Olgaç Bozalp is on present at 1014 Gallery in London from 2 February-10 March 2023, and is printed by Void.
