With her elaborately staged photographs of women in their various cultures, Pinar Yolacan approaches a whole range of issues that refers to art history. Beauty, history, fashion, the female body, religion, colonialism, cultural heritage and the recurrent subject of death get examined in a new light through her camera.

In “Maria” she portrays afro-Brazilian women dressed in handmade costumes made of vibrant fabrics and shiny jewellery in a painterly manner. Only at a second glance it becomes clear that beside from using ordinary fabric, she also uses animal parts – such as intestines, testicles and the placenta of a sheep. The garments are carefully designed and match the physiognomy of each individual woman, such as the shape of the mouth or the wrinkles.

The baroque portrait tradition and vanitas symbolism Pinar Yolacan refers to is at the same time challenged by the artist choosing models who don’t match the conventional paradigms at all. Moreover, Yolacan distorts the tradition with the surrealistic device of using inadequate materials. The portraits can also be seen as a comment on the obvious exoticism in art history and on Portuguese colonial history. In that perspective, her portraits follow neither a modern nor an established anthropological ideal of beauty but show a strength and dignity that is independent of temporary styles and political statements.

Local culture and circumstances are the fundamental elements in Pinar Yolacans meetings with people and add a social and communicative aspect to her work. She takes on the role as an observer who examines historical, traditional and aesthetic contexts. As in “Maria”, the textiles in her new series “Anatolian Civilizations” are given an expanded role as a cultural fabric surrounding our identities. The series refers to the mother goddess figurines found in the Turkish Hacilar region dated 7000-5000 BC. The photographs depict corpulent women in full-body overalls lying and sitting down in relaxed positions. By covering the entire body and their faces the women remain anonymous and turn into sculptures, they become an abstract image of “the woman” putting questions about her role as the bearer of life and the ideal of beauty. Again, the textiles are directly linked to the motifs as the overalls take up the colour and structure of the material of the antique figurines.

Pinar Yolacan was born in Ankara, Turkey, 1981, and studied art and fashion design in London (Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design and Chelsea School of Art and Design) and New York (Cooper Union School of Art). Her work has already attracted extensive attention internationally and has been exhibited in the United States, various countries in Europe, South Africa and Turkey. She is e.g. represented in The Saatchi Collection (London), The J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles), Kiasma (Helsinki) and the International Center of Photography (New York).