Reality or Truth? Questioning Representation in Photography
Esra Özdoğan and Sinan Eren Erk

Focusing on the relationship between mass media and art, And Now The Good News: Works from the Nobel Collection exhibition’s events continue with Esra Özdoğan and Sinan Eren Erk’s talk titled “Reality or Truth? Questioning Representation in Photography.”

Bringing together artworks that discuss the most critical issues in science, culture, and politics in the last 150 years, And Now The Good News exhibition depicts the transformation of concepts such as gender, religion, and ethnicity in art and media. In the talk, Özdoğan and Erk will open the "real, authentic image/copy, simulacrum" opposition to a discussion, and evaluate the photographs in the exhibition in the context of truth, representation, and code parallelism.

Free admissions, drop-in. This event will take place in the auditorium. The talk will be in Turkish.

About Esra Özdoğan
Esra Özdoğan graduated from Lycée Français Saint-Michel and Istanbul University, Department of French Language and Literature. She completed her master’s degree in Literary Criticism at the same department and at Sorbonne Nouvelle LGC with a thesis "The Rewriting of Myths in the 20th Century French Literature." Between 1994-2001, she gave lectures on European Cultural History, Linguistics, French Art History, and Literary Criticism at Istanbul University Faculty of Letters. Between 2001 and 2003, she was the editor of foreign publications at Yapı Kredi Publications and took part in the editorial board of the magazines Sanat Dünyamiz and Kitap-lık. Özdoğan worked as assistant editor and editor at Can Publications between 2005-2007. Since 2001, her articles on literature and art have been published in the catalogs of institutions such as Pera Museum, Sabancı Museum, Istanbul Modern, and Koç Library. She translated nearly fifty books from French into Turkish, including art books and exhibition catalogs.

She completed her master's degree in Marmara University Photography Department between 2016-2019 with a thesis titled “Time and Narrative in Photography, Examples of Jeff Wall and Nan Goldin in Focus on Paul Ricœur's Triple Mimesis”. She exhibited her photographs for the first time as part of the Mamut Art Project. Today, her photographs are included in many collections at home and abroad. She took part in two group exhibitions in 2021. Esra Özdoğan works as a freelance writer and photographer.

About Sinan Eren Erk
Sinan Eren Erk completed his secondary and high school education at Galatasaray High School, his undergraduate education in Economics at Marmara University, and his master's degree in Visual Arts and Curatorial Studies at NABA, Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti Milano. He worked as assistant curator at the 12th Istanbul Biennial, as a participant/speaker at Documenta 13, and as assistant curator at the Istanbul Design Biennial in Milan at Adhocracy. Continuing to work as an independent curator and art writer on national and international projects, Erk gives speeches, seminars, and trainings. Sinan Eren Erk, who produces and hosts the independent podcast called "The Strange Thing They Call Art", which has been published online since 2021, is a member of the International Association of Art Critics AICA Turkey.

Image credit:
SUPERFLEX I Copy Therefore I Am, 2011
Offset print on paper (poster), on aluminium
60 x 65 cm 
©Courtesy of the Artist 

Temporary Exhibition