İz Öztat & Zişan
İz Öztat was born in 1981 in Turkey and lives between Istanbul and Berlin. Her work explores the persistence of violent histories through forms, materials, space, and language, responding to absences in official historiography with speculative fictions. Through her alter ego Zişan (1894–1970) she constructs intergenerational narratives that address suppressed pasts and contemporary authoritarianism. Her work has been shown at Meşher, Istanbul (2022); the Schwules Museum, Berlin (2018); the Sharjah Biennial 13 (2017); the Heidelberger Kunstverein (2016); and the 14th Istanbul Biennial (2015). She has participated in residencies in Amman, Berlin, London, Madrid, Mexico City, Oslo, Paris, and Yerevan.
RESEARCH MATERIALS (14 ISSUES OF ROZA WITH PROCESS NOTES AND TRANSLATIONS)
2023
felted wool
The research process was initiated in the context of an invitation to participate in the project In Time & On Ground by Merve Elveren and Çağla Özbek.
Courtesy of the artist, the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA), and Zilberman, Istanbul | Berlin
İz Öztat’s After includes the repeated motif of a black rectangle by artist Zișan (1894–1970). Öztat has been collaborating since 2010 with Zișan, whom she describes as a “historical figure, ghost and alter ego.” On one side of the installation is a work on paper by Zişan, dated 1923, the year the Republic of Turkey was founded, comprising a black square and the inscription “Felaket,” meaning “catastrophe” in Ottoman. The video Dear Roza takes as its departure point readers’ letters published in Roza, a Kurdish women’s antiracist periodical launched in 1996, which published 17 issues. Roza means “dawn” in Kurdish and is also a reference to the Marxist theorist Rosa Luxemburg. Across different histories and references, After ruminates on intersecting questions of self-determination, the nation state, and emancipation.