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Cloth People from Outer Space: Nilbar Güres’s Dialectics of Identity

Nilbar Güres ̨, Uzaylı Kumas ̨ insanlar (Cloth People from Outer Space), 2005, ink on hand-made paper, 30 pieces, 5 × 5cm each. Photograph: Nicole Tintera. All images courtesy the artist; Rampa, Istanbul; and Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna
Looking at the use of fabric, concealment and memory in Nilbar Güres’s work, Lara Fresko outlines the artist’s response to a globalised framework of identity. Nilbar Güres ̧’s visual language draws from the mobility of a globalised world, yet at the same time revolves intensely around specific localities and the identities they harbour. In this rift, her work often captures the queerness that arises from the artist’s own sense of being out of place. Often focusing on subjects who have little or no visibility, her intricate and elusive videos, photographs and collages attempt to find moments of clarity amongst absurd elements of quotidian life or, conversely, stage scenes that foreground the absurdity also hidden amidst it.

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