Voice, Vitrine, Tar: Unreliable Narrators from Archive to Memoir, Fiction to the Visual Arts

Edited by Emrah Serdan.
Designed by E S Kibele Yarman
Proofreading by Matt Hanson

In Voice, Vitrine, Tar: Unreliable Narrators from Archive to Memoir, Fiction to the Visual Arts, writer and researcher Çağla Özbek pursues ‘unreliable narration’ as an effective construct in revisiting feminist archives and imaginations, providing an invaluable method in doubling down on the critical breaks between recorded history and lived reality not only within the bounds of fiction writing, but also in visual arts and archival tendencies.
Locating unreliable narration as a critical strategy extending outside the realm of literature which contests both linear history-making, the works of leading contemporary artist Hale Tenger are examined, pursuing possible unreliable narrators in them while making the argument that these visual narratives (which are often accompanied by reflective surfaces such as glass, vitrines, mirrors and puddles) deftly shed light on the tension between historiography and artistic imagination by pointing to the deep rifts between written history and the lived experience of historical events.
The last section of the book comprises artist’s interviews with artists Furkan Öztekin and Esra Özdoğan who both use linguistic and narratological elements in completely different ways in their practices, along with a conversation with writer and editor Emrah Serdan, musing on the procedures of unreliable narration and the ways in which voice and truth relate to one another in literature
and visual arts.
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This publication was produced
with the support of 2022
Saha Sustainability Fund.
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Unreliable Narrators from Archive
to Memoir, Fiction to the Visual Arts
Çağla Özbek is a writer, editor and researcher focusing on publications, exhibitions and research projects materialising in the myriad intersections between visual arts and the written word, with a dual focus on feminism and literature. Özbek studied Western Languages and Literatures at Boğaziçi University and holds an MFA degree in Creative Writing (Fiction) from the New School in New York, and an MA degree in Art History from The Courtauld Institute of Art, London. Özbek co-founded the online feminist platform 5Harfliler.com in 2011 and worked as an exhibitions officer at the Sakıp Sabancı Museum, Istanbul between 2014-2021 in the making of large-scale exhibitions focusing on modern and contemporary art. Most recently, she co-curated the feminist archive project/exhibition In Time & On-Ground as part of the 17th Istanbul Biennial in collaboration with Women’s Library, Istanbul and is currently co-editing the first monograph of artist Hale Tenger (forthcoming in 2024 from Archive Books, Berlin).
Özbek is the author of Yukio Mishima, Eikoh Hosoe and Ordeal by Roses (2020, Onagöre) and the artist’s book Semada (2021, Onagöre).