What is opposed to I: a struggle towards purity

Official URL: http://risc01.sabanciuniv.edu/record=b1167579 (Table of Contents)

The purpose of this thesis is to suggest a reading of my works, which I produced in two years, around the concepts of purity and impurity. In this study, the role of “dirt” is examined in terms of social regulations and bodily disorder. While defining these conceptions, I considered the “transgression of boundaries” as my focal point. Related with this statement, the problematics of how dirt is interconnected with locality and blurs the borderlines; and in what way the body becomes responsible for that irregularity, were analyzed. In this exhibition, the projects I produced assume the body as the primal source of impurity, and by implication, the term abject was evaluated from the point of psychoanalysis. In this way, it will be clearly seen that impurity, in all senses, attacks the totalizing and thus the discriminatory aspect of identity, system and order. By this means, most of my works challenge the constancy of the body's entirety. Chapter 1 examines the theoretical substructure; Chapter 2, the artists with similar affinities. The conclusion analyses my works in terms of the theoretical framework, as set out in Chapter 1.