Ahmet Polat - Work

Work

Rebound of the Gaze: the Photographs of Ahmet Polat ; by Dr. Wendy M.K. Shaw

I often notice that all forms of nationalism seem to have passed me by: whether supporting a team, feeling part of a nation, or declaring a religion, I find myself with no desire to pick a side. I used to see this as a product of birth compounded by experience: half this and half that nationally and religiously, people have always seemed eager to either tell me I was foreign or, if accepting me, let me know that this was a signal of their own broad mindedness. I particularly resented the repetition of Noah’s ark when it came to dating and marriage, since so many of my friends ultimately chose to mate with their own ethnic, religious, and class species. However, as I’ve grown older, if not wiser, I have discovered that the state of being in between is not only one that one is born into, but which one can also grow into through experience: through education, immigration, or simply individualism. So many people are foreign, or feel foreign, when one scratches the superficial practices which produce collective identity. The difference for those of us of mixed heritage, even more for those of mixed race, is that we wear our foreignness where it is readily visible, and where people often feel compelled to confront it immediately upon meeting. The fulcrum between hiding and revelation of identity sits in a different place than for those who are more clearly part of defined communities. And yet we all produce our communities, including those of us who are mixed, either double or in-between, both local and always foreign in every community to which we belong. The photographs of Ahmet Polat, a Dutch photographer born in 1978 to a Turkish father and a Dutch mother, capture this space between belonging and being foreign, the simultaneous act of going and coming. This seemingly contradictory activity takes place both in the production of the photographs and in the images themselves. Like many photographers, Ahmet is a wanderer, attempting to understand the world by capturing it in instantaneous glimpses. Yet at the same time, his photographs refuse this curiosity. They turn back on him as well as on us, the viewers; they look not only back at us, but also in many other different directions, asking more questions than they answer. His early body of work documents his return to the Turkish village of Çakal Koy near the city of Gaziantep, where his grandfather was born, and to the city of Yalova, where his relatives were among tens of thousands who suffered through the devastating earthquake of 1999. This work reflects a quest for lost identity, a recuperation of an unknown past. It is as though his father – who left the family when he was a teenager - was one of those who walked away along the road portrayed in one of his photographs. However, his father’s experience is not his own and they he cannot partake of another’s memories. The gaze of someone from two cultures is always double: at once foreign yet comprehending of the myriad cultural signs around him; at once understood as foreign, rejected, yet simultaneously taken in, embraced. Unlike a casual traveler, when Ahmet returns to Turkey, he knows what he sees: the villagers of Gaziantep, as well as the people he stays with in Yalova, are relatives. Yet just as he does not bear the callused hands of a farmer or suffer the crashing concrete of a home lost in a devastating earthquake, his relatives share neither his Dutch home nor language, nor his ambivalent sense of being foreign at home - wherever he lives. EXAMPLES Both the relatives and the photographer seem familiar to each other yet they are also ciphers. They magnify the uncanny relationship between those we know but cannot always understand, as well as the surprising familiarity and comfort we can sometimes find in the casual glance of a stranger. His photographs approach the status of documents, promising added knowledge of the unknown. It almost seems as if they could fill in the blank wooden map of Turkey shown in one of his photographs, a map which both the foreigner and the child born abroad share. But like the stranger whom we gradually come to know, his images ultimately present increasingly complex questions which photographs cannot help always leaving unanswered. These are not simply anthropological questions of “who?” and “why?” which might be explained away by stories or customs, but more profound issues structured by the photographs themselves. In one of his earliest photographs, openings along a street – dark doorways and windows – become frames for odd moments of life: a woman examining the bottom of her shoe, a man smoking and looking out of a basement window, rolled carpets out of place, sitting on a chair on the sidewalk and, amidst it all, a girl holding a ball and looking at the camera, as though playing catch with the photographer. Here the gaze itself becomes like a ball which the subject catches and, in the next instant, will throw back. With it, she threatens to shatter the lens and the power through which it produces knowledge for the viewer. Similarly, sitting in the back of a car, the photographer looks out the front window, ignored by the driver captured in profile in the rear-view mirror, but caught in the act of peeking by the child who, rather than sitting properly in the car looking forward, instead looks back at the camera. As in the image of the shadow of a child and a ball between two shuttered windows, the photograph captures the instant of the rebound. This rebound is caught repeatedly in numerous images: by walls which point to a winding tree and the embrace of two men; by the outstretched arms of a proud man holding a cigar and wearing a cowboy hat; by the lines of a football field which point towards and away from a boy sitting at their corner, out of focus and eyes closed; and by the walls of a building which bend away from the shadow of a tree. Not limited by these simple compositional devices, this rebound reappears in Polat’s frequent use of mirrors and lights which confuse the direction in which we, the viewer, are supposed to look, sending our own gaze elsewhere. A mirror positioned over a bending child reflects the sky, as if it were laundry hung to dry, or as if it were a broken window, threatening to crash down, or as if it were her freedom, if only she turned around and looked up. Yet it is the photographer’s mirror which plays with our understanding, forcing us to imagine beyond the frame of the image. Through the mirror, a wall becomes a window, enabling us to gaze at a small coffee house without being seen. Boys become caught in their own vanity as they evaluate a haircut. Men surround a television which shines forth without an image, like a flash bulb popping as a picture is taken of us, the viewers, catching us as unaware as the subjects in his photographs. Like the people in many of Polat’s group photographs, we begin to look every which way, and in doing so, begin to look beyond the limits of the frame of the photograph. The photographer arrives, sees, but does not conquer. Instead, he wanders away, having interacted with the world both for himself and on our behalf. He leaves the scene as he entered, neither a blank slate nor a scholar. He has paused to capture not what he sees, but to capture other people engaged in looking: engaged, actually, in life. We may empathize with these lives, but they remain outside our experience, rendering the photograph as opaque as it is transparent, a door as much as a window. It is good to remember this lest we expect photographs to reveal so much about their subjects that they give us as viewers a sense of command over the lives of others. As Ahmet Polat shifts from an examination of his personal history towards multiple arenas ranging from fashion to environment - both inside and beyond his homelands -he is no longer limited by the dilemma of identity. Rather he has been empowered by its placement of him on a boundary between empathy and exclusion – wherever he may wander.

In 2008, he was portraited for the Dutch cultural television-magazine, Van Hier Tot Tokyo.

Both in his autonomous and commercial work, Polat's signature is evident: meticulous in composition, enigmatic in content, and expressing an overall warm-hearted curiosity for human relations.

Motivated to show the traditional and the modern life of his father's country, Polat can be found working both in the outskirts of Turkey and among the high-society of Istanbul. In October 2008, the French edition of Vogue magazine published an article with Polat's view of Istanbul.

Since 1999, Polat has participated in more than 20 exhibitions, at galleries including Stroom (The Hague), RAM (Rotterdam), Karsi Sanat (Istanbul) and Galeri X-ist (Istanbul). In 2007, he had his first solo exhibition at the Istanbul Modern Art Museum.

Polat's book "...Neither Here Nor There..." (Mets & Schilt), a personal journey for identity, was released at Breda Photo 2008. This annual international photo festival also included a solo exhibition under the same title at the Nieuwe Brabantse Kunst Stichting (NBKS). The photo book was co-published with "Managing Diversity", and is initiated by the European Cultural Fund.

He's currently working together with Award winning designer, Sybren Kuiper on a new Book publication coming out by the end of 2011. His Exhibition at the FOAM museum in Amsterdam, October 2010 will travel to DEPO Istanbul in 2012.