Spike Island Residency in Collaboration with Platform Garanti

Fall 2008

Fatma Ciftci was born in Amasya in 1981 and now lives and works in Istanbul. She graduated from the Bilkent University Fine Arts Department of Ankara in 2005.

Cifti works with photography, video, performance, animation and drawing, merging these different media within her artistic practice. She often introduces found images and objects to her works in order to invent games that blur reality and fiction, as well as modes of representation and creativity. In her recent works Cifti’s interest has focused on political and military issues. For example I will be a soldier is a series of eight embroidered drawings that each depict the black silhouette of a soldier in a different military position. The inspiration for this series is a toy soldier and the childish expression ‘when I grow up I want to be a solder’. The relationship between the influence of such a toy and a child’s imagined dream can be seen as both ironic and paradoxical.

Once Upon a Time in Istanbul is a video project in which Cifti overlays a found amateur 16mm film with dialogue from old Turkish movies. The video was shot in the 1970s in Istanbul and it presents scenes of people and their social activities of that period. Cifti’s layering of periods and subjects creates a complex sequence that sees change condensed into one act.

In 2008 Cifti attended the Spike Island Residency programme in Bristol for three months. Her work was presented on the YAMA public screen in Istanbul in 2008 and in Asia Art Now, Arario Beijing, China, 2007; Mom’s Livingroom, Goyang Art Studio Exhibition Hall, Seoul, Korea, 2007; freekick (hospitality zone of 9th International Istanbul Biennial, Turkey, 2005; and in the 23rd Exhibition of Contemporary Artists of Istanbul and of Diyarbakir, Turkey, 2004.