Fatma Bucak

MOCA Toronto | Canada

Acts of Erasure

SAHA provides production support for Fatma Bucak's project for "Acts of Erasure" at MOCA Toronto, held on 1 October 2020 - 3 January 2021. "Acts of Erasure" brings the two distinct artistic practices of Fatma Bucak and Krista Belle Stewart into dialogue. This pairing opens space for conversations around political identity concerning land and heritage, methodologies of historical repression and interpretation, and the act and effects of erasure. The photographic emphasis in Bucak’s work is realized through sculptural forms. For this exhibition, she has reconfigured an earlier artwork, Remains of what has not been said(2016). Another of her works, A Study of Eight Landscapes (2012–16), confronts the contingency of border spaces and the tenuous interdependency that resides within them. To produce these still-life photographs, Bucak worked collaboratively with people living and working near and across borderlands. The composed objects collected from these sites explore mental and material realities of spaces where conditions of life are highly dependent on the entities on either side of a border. The photographs present a stark view of transitional landscapes, such as those between the United States and Mexico, Turkey and Armenia, and Syria and Turkey.

Fatma Bucak graduated from the Royal College of Art in London with a MA in Photography. Bucak also studied Graphics at the Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti and Philosophy at the Istanbul University. Bucak's works bring together performance, video and photography and portray observations from reality as well as constructed fictional and mythological frames. In her works, a certain stance of sexual identity brings various stories that carry truth and political power into a mise en scene. Within this view, issues such as male dominance, religion, cultural displacement, presence and absence are tackled with a clearly pragmatic approach. Fatma Bucak lives and works in London and Istanbul.