The world recently came to know that surviving in dysfunction is not uncommon for Turkish women. We don’t actively participate in economy. We’re being discriminated at work. Some of us never had an orgasm. More seriously, most of us go through constant physical and emotional abuse. About 40% of us are being beaten and threatened with death by our husbands. 2969 of us were murdered in the last 10 years.
I am by no means in favor of frequent repetition of numbers because familiarity is tricky. Commonality is not easily distinguished from what needs to be the standard. Over-simplification takes us away from truth. We need more augmented, non-linear forms of communication to bring us clarity. Below, I curated some of my sister’s work for this very reason. Living, breathing and incomplete.
"I took the first photograph of this series about 4 years ago with my analog camera. You can see only an eye of whom I photographed, Zerrin. She was my only close friend at film school those days. After one year I took this photograph, Zerrin and her older sister Betul were shot and killed by Zerrin's husband.
Before the bodies were sent to be buried in their hometown, Samsun, they were brought to where they lived and died one last time. I remember only a few things from that day. One of them is a veil that covered Betul's coffin. She never got married - in Anatolia, it is a tradition to bury women with their veins if they were never married -. Ironically, when I think about Betul, this scene is the first thing that comes to my mind.
I dropped out school after this instance. A year ago I started getting interested in photography again. While I was browsing the archive, I found this first photograph and decided to create a series.
I used curtains because when we were kids, my sister and I thought of them as imaginary veils. Here was another irony. When we were playing, we were always ending up getting trapped. "
Cansu Yeliz Demir, Istanbul 2019 & 2020