Galeri Nev is hosting Esra Özdoğan’s solo exhibition The Ghost in the Machine, curated by Çağla Özbek.
The Ghost in the Machine focuses on ghosts as a theme that emerges throughout literary history, particularly 18th and 19th-century Gothic literature, 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. They explored and documented the many different facets this elusive concept takes on in human life and mind.
The Ghost in the Machine takes its title from British philosopher Gilbert Ryle’s term “the ghost in the machine”, coined in 1949 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 specter 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 postmortem 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 problem 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.
The exhibition continues until Jan 11.
