1968, Denizli. Lives in Rotterdam and İstanbul.

Provocative, disturbing, nuanced, sophisticated: these are the immediate descriptors of the work of artist Hatice Güleryüz. They are descriptors hard won from years of nomadic wandering mixed with a certain kind of gentle curiosity and steely unwillingness to take ‘No!’ for an answer. In her films, photographs and writings, she makes her mark over and again, though tinged as it is with laughter, fear, anger, it is a mark closer to the trace of a restless wind surfing the streets than that of the indelibly deep cut of a knife to the heart or bullet wound to the head. Forever cast into the neither/nor regions of life, Güleryüz’s work embodies, simultaneously, as foreigner and familiar, the sensuous and the pornographic, the embarrassed and the brave, the degree and the layer, the history and its present. Strange Intimacies is a journey, her journey, our journey, which ingeniously expresses the mark – traces of the city – this mad, cruel, wild, secular, floating, intelligent, superstitious city – colour coded in time, and expressing what all curious, wanderers, nomads know to be true: we just want to go home (there is no home).

Johnny Golding

GARANTİ BUILDING