* Oda/o-da exhibition, exhibition catalogue
I have been an educator for 30 years. It has been 30 years since I was an assistant at the Academy, as it was then called, or with its current name, the Mimar Sinan University of Fine Arts. As someone who triggered the times in the 80s when people who worked in photography split into camps, at a time when art and photography met but yet bitterly criticized each other, as someone who contributes and pushed for development and implementation of the period’s infrastructure I aimed to create a free environment, where everything that is forbidden in the name of photography, is done, and my students receive a self-aware, sensitive, tolerant and enthusiastic education, valuing modernity, innovation, individuality in the direction of their personal tendencies and production-oriented creative, structured on an academic solid foundation but not prescriptive, strict or conservative. I met countless people in this long-time period; among them, nine young people who will be young educators of the future are exhibiting their photographic expressions today within the frame of the concept of oda/o-da that have different meanings. The work shown in the exhibition catalog and displayed at exhibitions can be carried to the meaning dimensions of the inner reality of I on one hand and the direct or indirect relationship of I with the indicated other on the other hand and can be paraphrased in this direction. For the exclusions or the indicated other, these studies mean an inner look; for I self-portraits are predominantly an outer look for me, and this symbolizes the revelation of the essence of concept in the normal rhetoric of photography.
This exhibition is a window for the concept of the oda/o-da, comprises the products of nine young creators, who really kneaded contemporaneity and quality with their own subjective tendencies, in order to, as Victor Burgin also names it, find meaning and establish meaning. I applaud my young colleagues for their proactive behavior that courageously defends the contemporary facts against the opinions and thoughts extending from expressionism framing the exhibition towards the fantastic reality, the new real and gradually reaching the conceptual art, and against the negative features of mixed exhibitions.
The process undergone by photography education, the process undergone by the country, globalization, changing art, the new technology-assisted dimensions of concepts and the creativity … In the present century, the thought that we witness the commencement of a new era, the post-photography era has started to gain wide currency. With these thoughts, years will pass again very quickly. The training will continue every year as if rejuvenated. Younger generations will show the efforts to become new masters with the knowledge they have acquired from their past masters.
January 2007
