Loop Barcelona 16
2.-4.6.2016
Ferhat Özgür «A Young Girl is Growing», 2003-2015,? video
To get her hair straight and tidy, the “young girl growing up“ has to act out her ritual every day: Her mother irons her glossy, black hair. She kneels down in the centre of a baroque space, her face expressionless with the internalized images within her. The more she remembers her wavy hair, the less she feels she exists. Change has become a kind of magic. She reads the striking image of her “straight hair” as a philosophical text. Which myth is it, that she follows through the authority, the iron has on her hair! From the theatrical feast of change to the representative poetry of the straight hair, from the paranoia of affectation to the practical critique of a formed rather than natural beauty, hereafter the figure has completed the theoretical framework of its own spectacle.
Ferhat Özgür (Ankara, 1965) took part in 10th Istanbul Biennale and 6th Berlin Biennale. He has held solo shows in venues such as the Michigan University Museum of Art, 2016, MoMA PS1-New York, 2013, Gallery Bernhard Bischoff & Partner, Bern, 2014, and Marabouparken-Sweeden, 2013. His works have been exhibited in numerous institutions, including the Seoul Museum of Art, Moderna Musset Malmö, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Centre George Pompidou, Salzburg Modern, MUMOK-Vienna, Istanbul Modern and BWA Sokol Gallery of Contemporary Art-Poland etc.
