ESRA ÖZDOĞAN
THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE
December 6, 2024 – January 11, 2025
Esra Özdoğan's solo exhibition The Ghost in the Machine is on view at Galeri Nev Istanbul between December 6, 2024 and January 11, 2025. Marking a continuation of Özdoğan's photographic works constructed as analogic responses to the mediums of painting and literature, the series of works that comprise The Ghost in the Machine focus on ghosts as a theme that emerges throughout literary history, particularly 18th and 19th century Gothic literature, in order to deal with issues such as the unknowability of death, worldly anxieties, the process of mourning and the passage of time. Inspired by the contradictory activities of ghosts who haunt and guide us alike, the works on display were created after an intensive period of work that continued throughout 2024, exploring and documenting the many different facets this elusive concept takes on in human life and mind. The exhibition is curated by Çağla Özbek.
The Ghost in the Machine takes its title from British philosopher Gilbert Ryle’s term “the ghost in the machine”, coined in 1949 in order to describe the concept of the mind existing alongside and separate from the body, as a response to Descartes’ mind-body dualism. The title also serves as a playful reference to the camera's ability, in its evolution from analog to digital format, to turn subjects, objects and emotions into a kind of spectre that leaves behind a palpable trace. With the Industrial Revolution and the rise of positivism in the 19th century, photography as a medium assumed a spiritual function in addition to its scientific, documentary and artistic dimensions; providing a method in which humans could make sense of the unpredictable and grave circumstances of fate. People turned to practices such as post-mortem photography, which was particularly popular in England and the rest of Europe during the Victorian era, to retain a final and eternal memory of their dead; they hoped to be reunited with their loved ones in the manipulated frames of “spirit photographers”. Özdoğan departs from the paradoxical nature of these historical attempts to revisit the fundamental problematic of the photographer’s ability to construct an alternative system of meanings, a question she has continuously addressed in her art practice to date. On the other hand, the proverbial “ghost in the camera” as reinterpreted in Özdoğan's practice also comes to signify the historically fraught, dual role of the photographer who both immortalizes and petrifies her subjects.
Özdoğan's photographic scenes are inspired by the idea that a ghost, extending beyond its primary definition as an uncanny unnatural entity that haunts, continues to accompany stages of the human life in different forms such as the unconscious, repressed desires, lost innocence, the heavy burden of remembering, feelings of mourning, and even childhood as a bygone state. Accordingly, the works in the exhibition span artistic genres and traditions such as the still life and vanitas in painting as well as Symbolism and Pictorialism in photography, constituting contemporary photographic experiments on legibility and ambiguity, spontaneity and premeditation.
*Galeri Nev Istanbul can be visited between Tuesday - Friday between 11 am – 6.30 pm and on Saturdays between 12 pm – 6.30 pm.