On The MASA

PROJECT SPACE
FATMA ÇIFTÇI – SHOW ROOM

Fatma Çiftçi (1981) returns to Spike Island after completing a three month residency in summer 2008 funded by Visiting Arts. This residency is an on-going collaboration with Platform Garanti CAC, Istanbul and has previously been awarded to Can Altay (2007). This will be her first solo show in the UK.
In Show Room, Çiftçi has created a series of works that play on juxtaposition, setting found images and objects in new contexts. These playful combinations make allusions to social and cultural differences through carefully crafted, handmade or digitally montaged works which sometimes have dark undertones. Cross-stitch pictures of military positions taken from toy soldiers, I will be a soldier (2008), refer both to childhood games and the reality of national service. An adjacent work, Would you like to marry me? (2009), has a cartoonish sexiness which is subverted at closer reading; the artist has programmed the LED screen of a pair of novelty knickers with a loaded question which has political rather than erotic undertones. Untitled (2005), is another archetype, this time a portrait of a policeman, rather than a solider or sexualized mannequin. The policeman stands on a cliff, appearing to be waiting for something as he guards the rugged landscape which is a well known tourist destination in Turkey. The video that greets the viewer at the entrance to Show Room, Once Upon a Time in Istanbul (2009), is a more whimsical project. Comprised of extracts from a found 16mm film of everyday life in Istanbul shot by an unknown amateur in the 1970s it is interspersed with romantic dialogue from a popular melodrama from the same period, contrasting incidental moments from everyday life with the heightened emotions of cinema.