South African artist offers intrigue with artwork on İstanbul

But for one visionary artist who has always been interested in expressing the intangible aspects of cities in her artwork, İstanbul has provided a plethora of moments, thoughts and feeling to express in her paintings, drawings and video installations. South African artist Diana Page, who moved to Turkey a few years ago, says İstanbul has become the “grit and gold of all of [her] work in Turkey.”

Noting that as a painter she is a naturally curious person, Page said: “I have always been interested in the layers of paintings and the layers of cities. How the surface or the skin of both continue to register what lies beneath. It’s about an imaginative history.” Speaking to Sunday’s Zaman, Page said she feels like a “free agent” in the city, exploring it on foot with no preplanned destination to reach. While her artwork is a record of her life in İstanbul and the changes of her perception of İstanbul, they do not represent a certain chronology or theme but instead focus on juxtapositions and recurring concerns.

Astonished by the grandeur, history and modernity of the city, Page created a series of paintings in regular house enamel paint that reflected her first “dazzling moments of İstanbul” and displayed them on the windows of the sleek 360 İstanbul Restaurant in Beyoğlu. Some of the aspects of İstanbul that intrigue her and which she uses to intrigue others are the peripheries of experience, the frontiers of space, the city and water, the noise and the silence as well as the history and modernity of the city. Most of her paintings do not include people, but Page is keen about incorporating human aspirations and emotions into her artwork.

She recently started a series of paintings called “Another View,” which reflects the mobility of perception of a commuter in İstanbul and shows how what one sees and experiences can change very quickly. “I am becoming less interested in the singular painting on the wall, and more interested in being true to the work as a kind of unfolding of perceptions and thoughts about the city,” she added.

The Bosporus has also been a source of inspiration for her. “The Bosporus appears to me to exert an enormous pull on the city and its inhabitants. There is a sense in which the built environment is makeshift and transient, continually shifting and changing. Ironically the Bosporus as a body of water often appears to have more solidity.”

The artist, whose work has been displayed in many galleries around the world, has a series named “Ships and Dreams” in which she depicts various cargo ships and freighters sailing through the Bosporus as symbols of not only passage and voyage but also of longing and aspiration. “There is also a sense of time and continuity in the journeys of these ships through the treacherous waters of the Bosporus. But these ideas emerge as I am painting or on reflection,” she said, adding that while she may spend a lot of time thinking about the Bosporus and the city, she never knows exactly how her thoughts and emotions are going to appear in the painting.

“Initially you need to be a master of your materials and your studio space and you may go after something, a feeling perhaps, a particular quality of light but in the end the painting must take you somewhere unexpected,” she noted.

When it comes to people’s perception of art in Turkey, Page said: “Education is crucial in growing an art audience in Turkey. It’s about more than art, too; it’s about encouraging a critical attitude where everything is open to questioning. Appreciation of another’s point of view makes art crucial in a society.” She also explained that people need to realize the value in attending exhibitions and collecting art. “Everyone can collect and everyone can be collected, not just Van Gogh or Jeff Koons,” she noted.

She hopes people who view her artwork find it entertaining and provoking to the mind but notes that the viewer does need to spend a little time to give meaning to the painting, as we live in a media-saturated world filled with images reduced in visual quality. “Our eyes and minds need paintings,” she reckoned.

A video performance on women’s voices in İstanbul

In addition to her paintings Page has created a very interesting video performance called “Kadınin Sesleri” (Women’s Voices), featuring several women reciting chants and inspirational speeches from the rooftops of buildings in the district of Galata in İstanbul. It was a piece that won her the Ampersand Artist’s Fellowship and an invitation from Axis Gallery to produce a sister piece to the video in New York City. Explaining what led her to produce the video installation, the talented artist said: “I was initially inspired by the rich sound environment of Istanbul, everything from the call to prayer to the simit seller, but it struck me that while one heard women’s voices in homes and neighborhoods and hamams, one didn’t hear them in the public sound space of the city.” She took advantage of a one-day art event organized by Galata Platform in 2007 to bring this issue to light. She had her performers, whom she met by chance, chant and deliver spirited speeches back and forth from the rooftops of two buildings in Galata with megaphones, hoping to document a “moment of intimacy in the city.” Page said the video was intended to “reverberate as a symbol of woman’s ability to ‘voice,’ reinvent and empower herself in the city, regardless of where she came from originally.”

Page has a solo exhibition later this year at Artspace Berlin. In the meantime, she is participating in several group exhibitions in İstanbul in 2010 including “Le Printemp des Artistes” (Spring Artists) organized by Istanbul Acceuil on May 14.

Her artwork can be viewed by appointment at her studio in Levent. Some of her artwork can also be viewed on her Web site.

Bosporus: a symbol of aspiration

Diana Page, whose work has been displayed in many galleries around the world, has a series named “Ships and Dreams” in which she depicts various cargo ships and freighters sailing through the Bosporus as symbols of not only passage and voyage but also of longing and aspiration.