“in fact, i can say that troubles motivate me better”
N: When we look at a work, you can render it differently and I can render it differently… Which one do you think is admissible?
İ: I think it’s yours. Because that work is for you… Because it is the reason for the existence of the sculpture. My job is not like a musician or an actor. I can't connect directly with the audience. If your sculpture is liked in this communication or if you, the opposite viewer, can communicate with that sculpture, I get my applause. I am glad that my sculpture is known more than my name. Therefore, how you communicate with it and how you render it is important to me.
N: Well, let's talk about these street works... How do these works come out?
İ: My street work comes out in a snap. I'd say it's reflexive. The sculpture “Ekmekçi Berkin’i arıyor” (Baker Searching for Berkin) or the sculpture “Ayrışma” (Segregation) are the works that emerged with this reflex. There were times that I got up from the raki table leaving my friends suddenly saying "I am going to work.” There were times that I got up all of a sudden and took my materials from the workshop, in Moda, I painted a miner and a mine entrance on the wall of a construction. Under that picture, “Can you come in for five liras for five hours? It's fate if you can't get out!” I wrote. Ten days later, 301 workers died. In fact, I can say that troubles motivate me better.
N: Should you pay attention to what you draw…
İ: You know, my friends said the same thing…
“this anamorphic narrative language allows me to add an extra paragraph to my stories.”
N: Then where did your need to shape beyond the visible arise?
İ: There are two sides to these anamorphic works for me. The first is optical illusion. The optical illusion that I use is a side that I can look at comfortably with the education that I had. It is also competitive. I like when things that are complicated, getting complicated for me. Otherwise, I feel like I am repeating myself in the next work and I cannot have satisfaction. The second is; there is a story in all my work. It provides an extra paragraph to explain the concept that I want to express in the figure or in the form or the situation that I want to criticise. For example, my work called “HES”(Hydroelectric Power Plant)… In this work, there is a tree and a pregnant woman figure in front of it. This is actually simple for many people... Mother Nature is ready to give birth! That’s it. But it's actually so different for me. The life of a tree is in its leaves, in its flowers, in its fruit. Those branches actually exist to transfer water to that fruit, to that soul. Then I have a light source that has been turned into an axe, the tree-killer. This light source is actually hydroelectric power plants... But on the other hand, these HESs provide us energy. It helps us improve our energy technology. So that actually becomes a long story. This anamorphic narrative language allows me to add an extra paragraph to my stories. And like I said, I like complex things. My last work took two and a half years. It was a very complex work consisting of four thousand parts. I had a great difficulty.