‘My sex life is satisfactory.’ From ‘Evidence of My Sexual Misdemeanour’ , 2022
Gökhan Tanrıöver
Gökhan Tanrıöver is a Turkish-born photographic artist, currently based in Madrid. Following an early medical career, he realised his vocation lay elsewhere. He meticulously constructs his photographs using film and prints them in the darkroom, which serves as his personal sanctuary. Often using repetition and alteration between the frames, he considers the roll of film as an event where he performs with and for the camera to construct imagery that focuses on personal and cultural identity informed by personal experience and memory.
After completing his BA (Hons) in Photographic Arts (2017) from the University of Westminster he has been shortlisted for the Peaches and Cream Photography Competition (2017) and selected as a finalist in the Royal Photographic Society International Photography Exhibition 160. His work has been included in numerous group exhibitions including Separation and Belonging, which he co-curated as part of the Whitechapel Gallery’s First Thursday tour in May 2016. In 2017, he was chosen to participate in the Travers Smith CSR Art Programme and received their Emerging Talent award for his series Confessionals.
The work was shown at Brighton Photo Fringe in 2018, receiving the Photohastings Shutter Hub award and was also shortlisted for the Athens Photo Festival 2019.Gökhan’s images have featured in numerous publications including Der Greif, Analog Forever Magazine, Source Magazine, Shutter Hub, Photograd and The Pupil Sphere. His work is held in both private and public collections including Travers Smith, Hogan Lovells, Garrigues and the Guildhall Art Gallery. Following his debut solo show at Argentea Gallery, in 2021 he has completed his MA in Photography at the Royal College of Art.
Interview with Gökhan Tanrıöver
What drew you to photography as a medium ?
My journey to photography as a fine art medium has been one with many detours, as I originally trained as a doctor, and practised for two years before making a radical change. During medical school I was drawn to more creative fields as a way to counterbalance the years of science-heavy education, but I felt that I wasn’t equipped with what was needed to be the author or the lead creator. I worked with artists at different stages of their careers and mediums such as performance, sculpture, drawing and photography; but it was only the latter that really grabbed my attention. The instantaneous nature of it and its ubiquitous quality felt a lot more accessible to me.
I purchased my first DSLR camera when I was 22 and took every opportunity to photograph what was around me, be it new places I travelled to or my own domestic space. When I decided to make a career change my intention wasn’t to use photography as a medium but to pursue a more commercial aspect of it – fashion and advertising. During my BA in Photographic Arts at University of Westminster I experimented with different uses or outputs of photography, but what I always returned to was using the camera to communicate what I wanted without anyone dictating what its content or purpose should be.
It felt absolutely liberating!
How has your practice changed over the last 3 years ?
It seems almost impossible to talk about the last three years without a reference to the pandemic. I had been pursuing my MA at the Royal College of Art when the first lockdown started, and during the last few months of my degree I was offered the opportunity to postpone my studies for a year. I wholeheartedly took it.
Most people that I knew, including me, were experiencing real anxiety over graduating and continuing with their practice afterwards. There can be financial issues, time restraints, not having access to the type of facilities that you had become accustomed to or receiving the constant direct feedback by your peers and mentors. Postponing for a year allowed me both temporal and physical space away from the institution and taste how it all could pan out in ‘the real world’ whilst continuing to work on an existing body of work: a test run at sustaining an existing practice.
One of the last questions during a critique at the RCA was why I chose to use 35mm whilst other formats could be more suitable for such studio work. I had no real conceptual reason for that and decided to invest on the camera I am using now. This change also meant that the pre-existing work from Evidence of My SexualMisdemeanour had to be reshot for consistency. I very quickly had to adjust from a fully dedicated state-of the-art photographic studio at the RCA to my own living room in the middle of the pandemic. This was the type of challenge that really excited me and I believe has tested my skills and determination when it comes to producing work. It is amazing what some kitchen foil, countless white mountboards and black velvet can do in an impromptu photographic studio; aka the living room.
During this period I also joined a community darkroom to make my prints, as I feel that it is a vital part of my work flow and it is the part that gives me the most joy and anxiety – two feelings that I fail to ever separate when it comes to my practice. I had found a way to sustain my practice without having to sacrifice how the work looked; for me this was essential.
With this growing confidence I also made a decision to move to Madrid, leaving the city where I had grown up and where I had built my photographic network. Whilst adjusting to my new locality and learning the language I took a short hiatus in my practice, though my notepad sketches and scribbles would beg to differ. Since then, I am working on a new body of work that has me stepping outside of the living-room-as-a-studio and traveling to the village where three of my grandparents are from. This new series is both challenging and exciting in different ways compared to my previous works.
What is your intention for the works? Is there a point of change/reflection for the viewer?
I hate the fact that I have to say I am ‘lucky’ to be able to express myself in a way that is only limited by myself and not an institution. The situation in the Turkish Military isn’t an isolated one and it is very important to raise awareness to be able to start combatting it and demanding a change. I am not under the delusion that my work is super loud or one that invokes activism, but awareness is a good starting point. I want the viewer to be seduced by the prints to then want to find out more about them and why they were made. For many people it is easy to brush past them simply as aesthetic pieces and it does not bother me if that is the only layer they want to engage in – I have very little control over what the viewer sees and takes away.
Which of your works on display do you think most link to notions of change ?
It is a difficult one to answer, but perhaps it would be My sex life is satisfactory. - the two cucumbers where the peel of one is meandering towards the other. They are indeed perishable: both the cucumbers as well as a satisfactory sex life.
Rarely satisfied by the first attempt, I often reshoot my images more than once. When I decided to change from 35mm to medium format, this image proved itself to be more challenging to replicate since the photographed cucumbers had already dematerialised. I had to procure a pairing where the curvature and girth were compatible and this meant buying way more than was absolutely necessary. To add sheen to its skin, I also bought vaseline, getting a judgemental look from the cashier in the supermarket. I guess they are not complete strangers to that scenario; after all, it was a Friday afternoon in Vauxhall!
It was not possible to get the same effect with the peel so I had to let go of my expectations and change how the two cucumbers interacted. It turned out to be a lot more impactful than what I had been trying to replicate.
The surplus of cucumbers made an appearance the following week as I took part in a performance workshop – there is only so much tzatziki you can eat. As a finale, we collectively gave a four-hour performance, occupying the same space with individual actuations. The peeler and the vaseline came in very handy!
What interests you about traditional photographic processes ?
The majority of my work is composed of still-life images, and the limitations and challenges inherent to that type of work are also present when working with film and using the darkroom as my site of production. Controlling how the light falls on an object with its material quality; how it translates on film; and then ultimately how I print it, give me various handlebars of control. I find it exciting when I figure out a way to manipulate a visible reality by manual means rather than making digital adjustments in post-production.
There is an artisanal quality to work in this manner and I like that each print has an indexical relationship with me – the object first seen by my eyes, its depiction on camera controlled by my hands, and its material incarnation in the darkroom modulated by own body movements and touch.
I don’t know where this desire of control and manual manipulation comes from, but instead of questioning it I am allowing it to serve me.
What does change mean to you?
In the most positive way, a personal growth that comes about as you adjust when facing a new challenge. A way of weeding out past sediments that no longer serve you and exposing a new fresh layer. This growth is usually not perceptible by others but it doesn’t need to be either.
Have you felt your works meaning change over time, and in what way ?
The work that I showed in the first Hot Sheet exhibition, Confessionals, arose at a time when I felt the need to question my current thought and behavioural patterns and trace them to specific moments in my childhood. It was an exercise of understanding where they had stemmed from and why; a practice of self-legitimisation as an adult. I have a different relationship to them now since all that abstract thinking found its way into the physical realm in the form of photographic prints and served its function as a personal form of auto-therapy.
The current book that I am reading challenges the linearity of time and posits that thinking of past events and traumas to justify certain qualities and thinking patterns we possess only strengthens them into our current being. To me this doesn’t seem fruitful as a framework of self-understanding and it only perpetuates something that at times may be problematic. Does this mean I should burn all my prints from that series? Absolutely not! Over time they have changed from moments of self-reflection to intimacy I have with the viewer, be it complete strangers or acquaintances that are discovering something new about me. It also opens up a dialogue about collective experiences from our formative years and experiences.
Your work is extremely personal, how does self reflection play a role in your project, Evidence of My Sexual Misdemeanour?
I think Evidence of My Sexual Misdemeanour is relatively less personal compared to my other works as it is more about an ongoing collective experience, one that I personally haven’t been through but have encountered many who have. I wrote my MA dissertation on how sexual identity and queerness is both evidenced and performed for an audience whose sole purpose in that specific setting is just to ‘legitimise’ that individual’s sexual identity by putting a stamp on a document, which is then archived. I am lucky to have bypassed that mechanism but unfortunately the problem still persists.
The starting point for each piece is a statement from the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), a psychological screening test comprising single statements that are answered with either Yes or No. The applicant’s responses must coincide with the identity of the gay man as dictated by the military: a dangerous man possessing the means to provoke, seduce and hence disrupt the military order.
I photographically respond to these statements, mostly as single images but also as diptychs and a grid of prints. I wanted to go beyond the simple binary of Yes and No and offer a multitude of responses to coincide with a multitude of queer identities – whose agenda is no to disrupt the military order but to simply survive and hopefully thrive. So, I would say self-reflection was not at the forefront but a more performative approach was taken to respond to a text-based prompt.
Interview by Curator Jasper Jones