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Green Art Gallery Dubai presents “Innerscapes” a solo show of recent works by renowned Turkish photographer Nazif Topcuoglu

Green Art Gallery opens its 2012 program with a solo exhibition for the acclaimed Turkish photographer Nazif Topcuoglu presenting a new series of works. Marking the artist’s second solo exhibition at the gallery, the show opens on January 11th and will be on view until March 5th 2012. A reception will be held on the 11th of January from 7 – 9 pm in the presence of the artist.


Nazif Topcuoglu, Guerilla Girls, c-print, 124 x 124 cm, Green Art Gallery Dubai

Known for his highly staged theatrical works typically featuring young girls living in lavish period backdrops, Nazif Topcuoglu’s photographs take on a nostalgic view of youth. While in his works, like Proust, he does not glorify a certain-definite- “past” era, he nonetheless implies a yearning for one’s own youth or an imagined “golden age”. The way in which we as humans rate our experience as valuable is through moments that are imagined, be they in the past (half-remembered) or in the future (not yet realized).

This idealization of youth however, goes hand in hand with an overall sense of sadness and desperation felt by the artist. With the encroaching global problems facing the youth today, wars, famines, economical downturns, a hope for a better future becomes an idealization in itself. Topcuoglu, who is part of the generation who participated in the major upheavals the world faced in the 1960‘s, maintains that the sense of hope, of a view of changing the world experienced then, seems desolate and almost obsolete today.

The young female characters depicted in his works have grown up in this very context and are now facing the various adult issues of the day. Like a modern day Alice, they may be opposed and frustrated at every turn, but they are mostly dissenters not collaborationists, speaking up against the way people insist on the rightness of their conventional ways of doing things. Like in the Alice stories, these girls raise the voice of common sense against the arbitrary rules and unjust commandments of the grown-up world. It is for this reason that when looking at Topcuoglu’s seemingly ‘pretty’ images of attractive girls, the viewer nonetheless cannot help but sense a disturbing tension at what lies beneath.

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