Digital painting. 3 works. 2021.
Three images. A pregnant man. Michael Jackson. A figure levitating over green land.
Each one is a case study in the West's relationship with its own contradictions — the stories a civilization tells about equality, progress, and nature while doing the opposite. The title is not nostalgic. The Wild West was always now: a frontier mythology that justified whatever came next.
The Michael Jackson image carries the sharpest edge. A man who was consumed by a culture that simultaneously worshipped and destroyed him, who changed his appearance under pressures no one has fully accounted for, who was then mourned by the same system that broke him. We performed the surgery without anesthesia and asked him to keep smiling.
My formation in Turkish-Islamic art history trained me to look carefully at how visual systems handle the body — what they celebrate, what they pathologize, what they make invisible. These three images come from that way of looking: lateral, attentive, from a position that was never offered a place at the center.
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Portrait of an artist as a pregnant man
If you are both male and pregnant, you have more serious problems than the question of who is the father.
Michael Jackson - Superstar
The whole world together we opened Michael Jackson's chest without anesthesia with a scalpel and smashed his heart and asked him to keep smiling. Then he changed his skin color and we buried our humanity in the ground.
Levitating over the fertile lands
Is it a coincidence that the countries with the most green per capita are the ones that pollute the world the most?
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