“You’ll collect them in your face.”
Work by Gülbin Özdamar Akarçay
Curated by Laleper Aytek
BursaPhotoFest, Pancar Deposu, Turkey
December 20, 2024 - January 20, 2025
“You’ll collect them in your face,” is a retrospective of Gülbin Özdamar Akarçay's twenty-year photography archive. Curated by Laleper Aytek, the exhibition features portraits of people from different countries around the world.
Özdamar Akarçay emphasizes that all the emotions of the city and life are accumulated in people's faces and explains the main theme of the exhibition with a short text from Ece Temelkuran's book Kıyı:
“If you walk with your face up, you’ll come face to face, eye to eye, with so many faces, you’ll unknowingly be registered in the street archives. A small space will open up for your eyes in the city’s History of Blank Faces. You’ll leave an instant of your eyes to people you don’t know, and collect unexpected instants from people you don’t know. In your face. You’ll collect them in your face. That is why city dwellers start to look alike as they look at each other; together, they transform into a single, common face. Every city has a single, common face; any person who moves to the city eventually acquires that face. This is how a stranger who comes to the city is recognized. Even if the locals don’t know each other’s names, they immediately recognize a stranger’s face. Those who don’t want to transform into a common face with the vast crowds who even fear entering the city’s ambiguous history, scattered across people’s memories—will, of course, memorize their feet, expose their warm napes to the wind, and like persistent fugitives, take the shortcut to their shelters. Whatever fabric they wrap around their necks, they can never teach their napes not to feel cold. Still, rather than be recorded in a slippery history, they shall choose to look at their shoes.”
