THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE

Beyond Apparitions: On Esra Özdoğan’s Phantasmal Intermediations

Çağla Özbek

“There’s no such thing as an end,” Chantal Akerman wrote in her memoir My Mother Laughs, chronicling the final days of her mother, “It’s possible that anything could happen again. Not in exactly the same way of course, but a version of the same thing could happen”.^[1] She may as well have been deciphering the proposition wedged in the heart of every effective ghost story. Whether the narratives around them deal with a timelessly human fear of death or modern anxieties about advancing scientific precision in the complex evolution between bodies and technologies, we seem to take refuge in ghosts because they allow us to forge the past and present into an open-ended, unbounded contingency.

Indeed, ghosts have historically served as an intricate and effective way to postpone definitive endings; our correspondences with them, too, tend to involve preservation instincts. Once translated into their hazy corporeality, our all-consuming obsessions, anxieties and trepidations continue to accompany, follow or haunt us from a safer distance. We think and dream in the face of loss, working through a palatable abstraction of sorts until we are able to externalize our fears and shed past selves. Sometimes it is the memory of a loved one whose loss we cannot bear to face that we transform into a ghost, while at other times, we cannot afford to forget the last photographs of the dead we follow from afar in increasingly devastating numbers and we endeavor to inscribe them as ghosts—as such, they become metaphorical approximations, placeholders of reality. This is worthwhile, generative work: The burdened ectoplasm of these visions continues to shift and vibrate along the mind plane, and in this way, they never fully disappear. It is often not the descriptive or representational qualities of a ghost that confirm that what we’ve encountered is a ghost, but rather it is the complex, uneasy emotions it evokes in us, engaging our conscience.

From Victorian post-mortem photography immortalizing the dearly departed in their final sleep in the early to mid-19th century to Henry James’ psychosexually charged, watchful resident apparitions^[2] in The Turn of the Screw (1898), from French physician Hippolyte Baraduc’s attempts to transcribe the human soul into an image through photographic experiments in 1913 to British Surrealist Ithell Colquhoun’s automatic writing séances attempting to correspond with the unseen^[3] using such techniques as fumage through markings of smoke on paper from the 1930s and onwards, the spectral order of operations in literature, art, and science have always traversed the material and the psychic. What is more, one central question about ghosts seems to concern the gauzy thin veil that separates us from them in shifting metaphysical and psychoanalytic matrices, as illustrated by Duchamp’s A Guest + A Host = A Ghost (1953), a conceptual pun investigating the nature of an inner substance and its shrouding envelope in the form of an empty candy wrapper and British artist Penny Slinger’s Dust to Dust (1970-77), a photo-collage staging the self and the possible other(s) in a dreamlike, abandoned interior. In the context of 20th-century art and literature in Turkey, two notable examples touching upon this veil separating the known and the imagined come to mind: One is the Impressionist Hüseyin Avni Lifij’s glaucous, pensive canvases depicting Ottoman mausoleums and tombs based on photographs documenting the ruins of Karacaahmet and Tokmaktepe cemeteries around the outer walls of Istanbul made between 1911 and 1927.^[4] The other is Kerime Nadir’s Gothic horror novel Dehşet Gecesi (“The Night of Horror,” 1958) executed in the author’s signature melodramatic register, where a ghost-vampire amalgamation haunts and seduces its prey against the backdrop of a luxury hotel built by an Iraqi sheikh, setting the mountains of Hakkâri as an expanse in the mysterious Orient. Through these propositions, authors, artists, and scientists have contemplated if it is ghosts who welcome us to their plane or if we summon them for our own worldly concerns, posing the question of whether we remember ghosts or simply recognize them as they flutter about our conscious lives.

With this expansive atlas of works and ideas in mind, I finally arrive at Esra Özdoğan’s pictorial scenes that make up the series The Ghost in the Machine, which focus precisely on the manifold functions ghosts assume in our personal and collective consciousness. All produced throughout 2024, these works are the final products of her artistic research spanning the distances between the process of photographing and the resulting photograph, the witnessing eye and the documenting artist. The fifteen scenes included in this exhibition do not follow a linear, consecutive narrative but instead cohere in thematic clusters: A number of these scenes double as vanitas paintings decorating the walls of a haunted mansion and bring to mind the conflicting nature of still-life as a genre,^[5] the following group of works document charged dynamics between listless subjects seemingly stuck in the picture plane, while the final group of works that close the exhibition feature allusive reflective surfaces urging the viewer to locate the artist herself in the frame. Supported by her “other selves” as a deft literary mind and an expert translator, Esra has forged a way to read her sources of inspiration in a way that results in a complete transfiguration which requires ample solitary time spent in the studio, following the moments of photographing in exchange with the performer/models. Esra writes and sketches extensively both before and after the shoots, and while this series has its definitive inspiration in Victorian, Gothic and early modern literature such as the aforementioned The Turn of the Screw, the cumulative effect of the photographs that make up the series corresponds to an intimate mythology. The human and non-human entities that appear in these representational narratives include wayward ravens, peacocks, and does; fleshy flowers and cacti in jewel tones; and pale, pearlescent women and children who are not merely borrowed fictional characters or muses but also narrators and instigators. In this way, Esra's living, looking and analyzing lens is engaged in critical dialogue with the picture plane, constantly questioning who the narrator(s) can be, constituting an intimate interrogation of the medium of photography itself. Once photographed and transferred to her work desk, Esra meets already existing frames halfway in her studio and re-stages them; in these photographs where she negotiates design and coincidence, she walks a fine line in her endeavor to inject literary and pictorial qualities to her narratives.

Although Esra’s current work is loosely connected to the larger map of esoteric and artistic investigations mentioned above, I most like to think of these frames together with the painterly narrative instincts shared by English photographer Julia Margaret Cameron’s performative portraits and domestic scenes produced in the 1860s and the 1870s. This is in part because of the directorial role both artists assume in configuring their tableaux vivants. Cameron, like Esra, carefully posed her models (consisting of family members, friends turned patrons and household staff) in her compositions; her photographs included performative indoor portraiture and interpretations of narrative poems such as Tennyson’s Idylls of the King along with other mythical and historical scenes which resulted in haunted, emotionally charged narratives. Cameron’s signature touch in these photographs was made possible through the use of long exposure times, chemical interventions and experimental production techniques to produce blurry, hallucinative compositions with haphazardly placed, soft focus.^[6] Esra’s interventions on the picture plane are executed through lights, physical filters as well as digital means.

The approximately hundred and sixty years that have passed since Cameron’s works inevitably witnessed but a few critical breaks in the medium, both in theoretical and technical terms: Barthes elucidated on the singular theatrical prowess of photography in staging death and its implications on the living,^[7] while digital manipulation in photography became more advanced throughout the 1980s and has been readily available in personal computers through increasingly sophisticated softwares from 2000s and onwards. These ruptures have favored a multi-faceted visual artist like Esra, enabling her to critically engage with the claim that photography is a means of documenting truth—an assertion central to the discipline since the rise of personal cameras in the late 19th and early 20th centuries—in a way that is entirely her own. As a nod to the ghost photographers of the 19th century, the production process of the scenes in the exhibition involved intensive manual labor at different levels of production, both in the shooting environment and in digital processes; the artist explains that meticulous processes were applied including double exposure, layer additions that require ample drawing and shading, as well as adjustments on opacity values and contrast settings. In this sense, The Ghost in the Machine also constitutes a narratological investigation that consciously breaks the illusion of “things as they are” in the art of photography.

But there is a prequel to every ghost story, and the story of this exhibition is no exception. I first met Esra in person some time in 2010 in Beyoğlu to discuss, among other things, the perils of a writing career. It was during one of these early meetings that she mentioned mulling over a short story draft, its darkly-lit plot taking place over the course of one rainy night in a household occupied by a worried mother, her young son and his nanny. As she recounted the central tension of the unfolding struggle between the nanny and the mother over who truly raises the child, she had also shared with me a doubt about whether the short story format was the right medium for this story. Reflecting on that moment today, while memory holds a seat, I find something profoundly fateful in our discussion about storytelling and its prospective media.

During these fateful meetings where we commiserated with Esra on the loneliness of fiction writing, little did we know that years later we would work alongside on the preparation of this exhibition that also lightly circulates the ghosts of our former, fiction-writing selves. It was a joy to work together during the production process of these works over the course of this year, getting to meet and discuss the myriad art historical and literary references that fed into this series; and most of all, witness the manner in which Esra’s roles as an expert translator and reader fed into her work in visual arts where authorly and painterly sensibilities are equally present. And so, it becomes undeniably evident that being alive means witnessing stories shift, transform, and gradually find their own medium.