Zeren Göktan
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Dead or Alive

Installation, mixed media; white cloth, moldy bread, label of bread

Eng

Dead or Alive

This work consists of moldy bread, a label of bread, and a white texture that is especially used for covering the dead body. White texture and the forms that resemble to the coffin are the elements that I used in a series of works. They can be viewed as objects that represent a process. In this work, I separated the moldy bread into forty colors and shaped each of the groups of moldy bread in the form of a small coffin. Bread is fundamental for nutrition in many societies. Its process of production entails sun, earth, water, and air.
Forty different colored small coffins were placed on white texture in eight rows, each row having five coffins and starting with the lightest color and ending with the darkest one. These colors show a continuous process of change. In Islam, the number of forty is believed to refer to the forty-day long duration of the dissolving of a body into soil or ground. The reason that I came with this idea is the result of the way I used to separate the bread into its colors because with the help of rolling pin I depleted or deformed the bread so much. On each coffin, there was a bread label, a proof of its existence. Moldy bread installed on white texture in the form of a coffin seems to be a representation of death, but it is indeed a living organism that continuously transforms itself.

  • Young Action IV, Tuyap Exhibition Center, Istanbul, Turkey
  • 26 Haziran - 05 Temmuz 1998
  • "Dead or Alive", Installation

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About Zeren Goktan

Zeren Göktan is a Turkish contemporary artist born in Ankara 1975. She lives and works in Istanbul. She is renowned for her practice in photography, installation, and video.

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Bütün Gezegen İçerideydi installation Untitledl installation
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