Exploring Identity, Memory, and Subversion with Gökhan Tanrıöver
Gökhan Tanrıöver is a Turkish-born photographic artist whose work delves deeply into themes of identity, memory, and cultural narratives. Based in Madrid, his practice merges meticulous darkroom techniques with conceptual exploration, creating compelling works that challenge societal norms and offer alternative perspectives on queerness and masculinity.
In his series Evidence of My Sexual Misdemeanour, Gökhan confronts the institutional processes surrounding identity in Turkey’s military system, turning his own domestic space into a site of resistance and creativity.
We had the chance to speak with Gökhan about his journey as an artist, the themes driving his work, and the role the darkroom plays in his creative process.
Interview with Gökhan:
SWD: Your journey from Turkey to the UK (and now Spain) seems to have greatly influenced your work. How have these transitions shaped your artistic vision and themes?
Gökhan: Switching between geographical and cultural landscapes meant that I was an outsider by default as identifiers or peculiarities of one culture are highlighted when you live in a different one. This granted me a detached view of parts of my identity in relation to most other people that surrounded me. This was most intense when I used to wake up to a Turkish household and go to a typical school in Britain. This individualised hybrid culture, ingrained in me over many years, is now being exposed to, and at times clashing with, the Spanish culture that I am immersed in. I think these experiences gave me a desire and a point of view to make work that revolves around themes of personal and collective identity informed by narrated history and memory. The process is very self-exploratory and has a therapeutic effect.
SWD: "Evidence of My Sexual Misdemeanour" explores deeply personal and cultural themes. Can you share how this project began and what inspired you to address this subject through photography?
Gökhan: Every time that I had a casual conversation with another Turkish man, almost without failure, the inescapable question arose: have you served your conscription yet? Every man in Turkey over the age of 20 is required by law to participate in the military service: a rite of passage that is deep-seated with ideals of masculinity and nationalism. Although most of the times it was a benign question, asked to fill in the gaps of a conversation, it can be very confrontational as there are very few instances where exemption occurs: being queer is one of them.
Homosexuality was decriminalised in 1858 in the Ottoman Empire, but the expression of queerness within the military is not accepted. Gay men wishing to be exempt from the service must declare and evidence their sexuality for the military to deploy a set of investigations to ascertain the applicant’s true sexuality. This process is both arduous and demeaning as pornographic imagery of the applicant in question is often required. These photographs are taken by the applicant following the unwritten formal rules that are secretly shared by past exemptees. The idea of a constructed imagery acting as evidence presented to an institution to make a decision on your perceived identity, and hence your military service status, is both outrageous and fascinating at the same time.
Although the series dates back to 2021, I wanted to make work about this topic as early as 2015. I felt that the topic was very compelling but I needed a lot more research and a deeper maturity in my own photographic practice, which I didn’t think I possessed at the time. In 2019, as part of my MA at the RCA, I wrote my dissertation and titled it ‘Evidence of my Sexual Misdemeanour: A Gendered Performance for the Abysmal Archive’. This acted as a catalyst as I attempted making my own photographic document with ‘Bedfellow’, where I fetishise my invisibility within the frame as a reference to the invisibility granted by the military to those that are made exempt from service.
There are other forms of evidence gathered by the military, however, and the commonest test used is the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. This is a psychological screening test comprising single sentences that are answered with a Yes or a No. The applicant’s responses must coincide with what the military perceives as being queer, and for this reason the responses are often very performative. I wanted to photographically respond to these statements from my own domestic space and handprint them in the darkroom, both territories serving as my sites of subversion. Through staging these photographs in a performative manner, I wanted to express and construct an identity on the gallery wall, one that confronts the imposed institutional identity of the gay man in contemporary Turkey.
SWD: You often describe the darkroom as your personal sanctuary. What is it about this space that allows you to fully immerse yourself in your work?
Gôkhan: I find that the darkroom is a very intimate space where we voluntarily dull the visual input that we are normally confronted by in our day-to-day life, and this in turn attunes our other senses. The dim red light turns up all the sounds in this hopefully light-tight space: the fan of the enlarger attempting to cool itself down, the gentle swish of the chemicals inside the tray, the metronomic drip from the taps and all the other faint noises that somehow permeate in from the outside… It requires a level of mental clarity and intention as it is too easy for your mind to wander off, but somehow the predetermined time in which you expose your paper or agitate the chemicals inside the tray gives you a finite time in which to search for any answers to the questions you may be asking yourself that day. It is a slice of time where you behave differently and alter your cognitions.
For a very long time, the darkrooms in which I made my prints belonged to educational institutions and these were more like the multi-faith chapel at an airport, with a constant stream of people and their differing practices: I went in with an intention and a hope that it would be empty to prevent any outside influence. Sharing this space definitely impacts the outcome that day, for better or for worse. At times, a very strong sense of camaraderie can develop with someone that you never thought you would be compatible with.
SWD: Have you ever had unexpected moments in the darkroom that reshaped the outcome of a project?
Gökhan: It won’t come as a surprise to anyone with whom I have shared a darkroom, but my practice is very planned and meticulous: some describe it, amongst other words, controlling and rigid. A remnant of my science background, each shoot or print follows an experiment with a set of variables. Most of the prints that I make are a result of multiple shoots of the same subject/objects with several variations each time. They require a series of test strips as I try different exposure times and combinations of filter grades.
For the work that I have been focusing on over the last two years, Waiting to be a Flower Underneath the Fig Tree, I wanted to introduce colour into my otherwise exclusively black and white work. In addition to my usual film of choice, I started shooting on colour transparency. This fine-grained film was unforgiving with regards to the correct exposure, but I welcomed the technical challenge and the vividly saturated images it recorded. Not being convinced with what adding colour brought to the work, I started making prints from it using my usual black and white paper. The series is inspired by the ever-changing and malleable family histories and tales passed down through generations, so the subject seemed appropriate for this alternative way of visualising the work. I also started using positive paper to print from my black and white negatives, another technical challenge as this paper is of fixed contrast and a very high one at that. This took me through a rabbit hole of making my own filter to use as a tool to pre-flash the paper as an attempt to tame its inherent contrast.
The initial objective of making colour work turned into a series of technical challenges and a deeper understanding of black and white printing!
SWD: Are there new themes or mediums you’re currently exploring? And are there other aspects of identity, culture, or queerness you’re eager to explore in upcoming projects?
Gökhan: Currently I am printing Waiting to be a Flower Underneath the Fig Tree. This will include large format prints once I can obtain trough trays for printing from a roll, a process that I have only tried once with one-to-one guidance. Unfortunately, some businesses that stocked these have closed down, so I am looking for alternatives in the meantime.
Once I am satisfied with these final prints, I want to go back to my previous project Evidence of My Sexual Misdemeanour, as there are 567 statements from the MMPI test to delve back into as my raw material. I also want to reference another psychological examination used by the military: the House-Tree-Person test. Here, the examinee is asked to draw a house, a tree, and a person, which are then subjectively interpreted by the examiner in an attempt to create a picture of the person’s cognitive, emotional, and social functioning. I want to bypass the objective eye of the camera and instead inscribe images on negatives by destroying parts of their emulsion; a destructive act to construct a persona under the scrutiny of an institution. I am also keen to experiment with chemigrams, a process that I previously haven’t used. I guess for now this is as close as I’ll get to working with colour.
Additionally, for several years I have wanted to explore the Turkish national sport of oil wrestling: an overtly homoerotic and gendered performance performed by and for the cisgendered heteronormative male. I have only seen it as straight photography, excuse the pun, in newspaper articles or editorials. Either rephotographing its archive or photographing the sporting events myself, I want the prints to be the grappled body that is manipulated by gestures and substances: a photographic practice performed by a queer artist.
To explore more of Gökhan’s thought-provoking work, visit his website and follow him on Instagram @gokhantanriover. His images offer a bold and intimate exploration of identity, inviting viewers into narratives that are both personal and universally resonant.
All images featured in this post are curtesy of © Gökhan Tanrıöver