Nazlı Yıldırım

With her series Anonymous Nazli Yildirim uses photography to communicate the inner experience of embodiment, but her dark images suggest that this can sometimes be an uncomfortable one. We don’t always feel at ease in or with our own bodies. This sense of discomfort comes across in how Yildirim compares the surfaces of her own body to the damaged surfaces of walls and trees, many of which resemble wounds or orifices. 

This feeling doesn’t occur in isolation from within; rather it is shaped by how we are perceived by others, reflecting the value placed on certain bodies or identities that are treated as the norm. There are times when women’s bodies, queer bodies, bodies of the ‘other’ in whatever form, might as well be invisible. The title of Yildirim’s work indicates an erasure, one that can leave us without the anchor of a self or an identity. To be made anonymous is to be reduced to a body, without a name or a place in the world.

Yet there is a kind of freedom in acknowledging that the expectations placed on ourselves and our physical forms are not always right for us. What looks like disconnection here – the broken surfaces, the solitary figures turning in on themselves – can also be understood as an opportunity for growth by different means, arising from an embrace of discomfort and the realities of being a particular body, a transformation Yildirim proposes in the fractured landscape evoked by these images.