Gülce Tulçalı

Growing up in Turkey, and then leaving for the most of my adult life, the culture of the veil, what it means, the endless possibilities of creating a visual language around it, obsessed me. The more complex the conversation got, the more I was aware of the dualities within the argument of freedom around the veil, which is represented as “doubles” in my photographic work. Most importantly, I came to realize that it has the potential to create a space for a lost conversation between two different women; secular and religious. 

I am interested in visual culture, both as a nurturer of political circumstances and as a remedy. From cinema to a digital image circulating on the Internet, I create narratives that recenter citizen-state dynamics focusing on women and their place in society. All the storytelling I create is a way of navigating the world as a sensitive human being, longing for social justice. 

Recently COVID has brought increased regulations, the reintroduction of curfews, bio-tracking, facial recognition, and general heightened surveillance; everyone is polarized in binary terms. The capitalist prerogative of this technology, compounded by this period of urgency, hurts minorities and marginalized communities who live in surveillance more than others. The question of ‘what it means to have a female body within an authoritarian state?’ finally becomes ‘what does it mean to have a female body within authoritarian technologies?’ for me and for everyone else.