Egenur Öztelli
Studied at Boğaziçi University, Department of Western Languages and Literatures between the years 2018-2022. Before her undergraduate studies, she went to the Flemish region of Belgium with the AFS intercultural exchange program in 2017 and studied economics and language there for a year. During her studies, Egenur, who started to receive theoretical and practical art education at Academie voor Beldende Kunst Mortsel fine arts academy, participated in the academy's student exhibitions.
In addition to the various art history and contemporary art classes she took from the academy and her later university, she was accepted to the "Curating Contemporary Art" program jointly worked by Akbank Sanat and Open Dialogue Istanbul, and became the curator of the "The Waste Land" exhibition project as her final project.
After working as a gallery assistant at Carre d'Artistes Istanbul art gallery, she continued her career as an Exhibition Supervisor at Kale Design and Art Center. She is currently working as an Artist Representative at PILOT Gallery.
The Waste Land
We live step by step every day, leaving traces behind us that can be followed with each step we take. But at the end of the day, can we decipher our own tracks on the road we walked?
While billions of people live in the world, when our paths cross with other people, and when they are walking on the same roads we walk on, when we look back, which traces were left on our path by ourselves, which were left on our way by other people, and which ones have deepened and made it difficult to cross the road, we are at a point where we can no longer distinguish.
The Waste Land has surrounded us, filled our minds, has become a part of our existence. How can we avoid this? How can we separate the waste from the trace, the trace from the waste? The starting point is awareness.
The poet Ezra Pound says about T.S Eliot's poem "The Waste Land", which is the inspiration of the İz Dünyası, "a certain fluid force against circumstance, conceiving instead of merely reflecting and observing” This power must be used against today's most pressing problem: the climate crisis.
As Oli Brown writes in his book "Migration and Climate Change", it is the case that 1 billion people will become "climate refugees" by 2050. This means that we encounter much more footprints on our roads than we anticipated.
The road is two-sided, one can go back, and go forward. When we go back at this point, the only thing we have in our power is to be aware; Ahead of the road is a new page. When the existence of human beings ends in the world, the paths and traces remain, and the fact that these traces are not "waste" depends on human beings.
İz Dünyası opens a passage to the past of "every human being", which focuses on the paths that the inhabitants have travelled, and focuses on the "physical", "psychological" and "digital" traces they leave along the way. It is time for reasoning to follow the projections of our paths we have crossed and left behind, and to save the paths we will walk in the future from becoming a waste land.