Furkan Öztekin (b. 1993) is a visual artist and researcher who lives and works in Tekirdağ, Turkey. He graduated from the Painting Department at Dokuz Eylül University Faculty of Fine Arts and is currently pursuing a PhD in Painting at the Institute of Social Sciences, Trakya University. In his artistic practice, Furkan Öztekin emphasizes the social through personal archives and stories. Since 2019, he has been working with the archive of artist and activist Ceyhan Fırat, focusing on the concepts of space, borders, emptiness, abstraction, and loss through the possibilities of queer art. In his works, Öztekin uses various media, including collage, photography, painting, installation, and found objects.
Relapse
Relapse is an extension of a research project that Furkan Öztekin has been conducting since 2019, based on the archive of activist artist Ceyhan Fırat, whom we lost in 2021. The project approaches the archive as a field of expression that generates new meanings with each encounter. This approach moves the archive away from a fixed historical narrative, evolving it into a structure that transforms, multiplies and resurfaces across different surfaces.
The concept of recurrence, forming the starting point of the installation, carries meaning such as re-emergence, resurgence, return. The term usually associated with illnesses; refers to the way the archive operates. The reappearance of a photograph, a color, a sentence, or a gesture years later, establishing new relationships; or the resurfacing of a forgotten detail within a different context, constitutes the central field of inquiry of Relapse.
At the center of the work is the archive composed of the texts, photographs, publications, and notes produced by Ceyhan Fırat throughout her life. Through this archive, the transitions between the personal and the collective transform into a form of partnership that continues to be thought through together during Öztekin's research.
Developed during the SAHA Studio, the installation brings together different layers of this collaboration. The paper installations spread throughout the space draw inspiration from the phrase “ramshackle pink” (pejmürde pembe), which Ceyhan Fırat used to describe the sky in the autobiographical novel Bacak Böcek Oyunu (1996). Continuing a color research project that has been ongoing since 2020, these works also reference the roll-based display aesthetics of wallpaper shops in the İMÇ. Papers dyed with materials such as water, dust pigment, coffee, soil, and ink, transform the space into a surface, together with the visual research produced throughout the program.
An important component of the installation is a bilingual publication bringing together poems and personal notes written by Ceyhan Fırat between 1990 and 2021. Titled Birlikte Rüzgâra Karşı Her Şeyden Konuşabilirdik / Ensemble, face au vent, tout deviendrait dicible (Together, We Could Talk About Anything Against the Wind), the publication brings together personal narratives spanning from Fırat's youth in Istanbul to the solitude following his migration to Switzerland, opening up the literary layers of the archive.
Collages, photographs, drawings, found objects, and interventions follow recurring traces within the archive while simultaneously converging with the formal investigations that circulate through Öztekin's own practice. Research conducted around Nataşa newspaper, edited by Ceyhan Fırat in 1994, the Güneş newspaper, where Fırat worked during the 1990s, as well as inquiries carried out at the Atatürk Library and the Beyazıt State Library, come together on the same ground alongside documentation produced throughout the program. These materials at times intermingle; the boundaries between document and interpretation become permeable.
