The Dispossessed is a series of photographs by Cansu Yıldıran that probe the past and her roots in Trabzon’s Çaykara township, where her mother is from. It is also a questioning of the artist’s own identity. Yıldıran began producing the series when she discovered that only men are permitted to own property in the highland village, which she visited every summer as a guest. In Çaykara, women are denied the right of ownership to this day. This longstanding denial of property and equal rights prompted the artist to seek out an identity through women who are deprived of basic rights. The photographer’s intensive use of light as both an artistic technique and a symbol reveals both what is systematically ignored and visibly concealed in the darkness in an almost excavation-like process. Thus, the photographs dredge up and expose the existential questions riddling the artist.
You can listen to our conversation in Turkish with Cansu Yıldıran in the podcast series accompanying OMM’s “Don’t Look Back Deep is the Past” exhibition.
OMM: The exhibition has a selection from your photo series, The Dispossessed. Your mother is from the Black Sea region, where you took these photographs.
Cansu Yıldıran: Ever since I was a child, we went to the highlands in the Black Sea region as guests. During our trip in 2016, I started taking photos spontaneously. Over time, these photos invented their own language and found their own story. I realized how the atmosphere in my photographs told the story of our “guesthood.” Using my own experiences as well as my mother’s as starting point, I pushed myself to think further about how women from the Black Sea region do not have a space of their own, how a home is so much more than four adjacent walls, the concept of “home,” and the importance of having your own space.
When you talk about the dispossession of women, you are talking about not being able to own property, right?
The highlands have many rules, and women not being allowed to own property is one of them. The thought process behind it goes as this: When women get married, they move in with their husbands, so they do not need property. “We don’t want her to bring a man, a stranger to our land,” they say. Meanwhile, a woman arriving at the said land is not that big of a deal, probably because she is not considered to have any impact on the family.
One of the most striking photographs in the series is a woman holding a rifle. What is her story?
The figure in that photograph is my aunt, Süreyya. She is my mom’s sister, and she lives in Hamsiköy with her husband on his land. That is why I wanted to photograph her; she is someone who left her own family behind, someone who misses her home and her land but had to move to her husband’s. By the way, many women in the region do not question this. You have to normalize certain things to get used to a place and survive.
I showed The Dispossessed at Leica Gallery in Istanbul. In the Q&A session, a woman from her privileged Istanbulite position dared to say, “If these women do not stand up for themselves, that means they deserve it,” questioning why women from the Black Sea did not resist. Now, someone who left their village can question the system upon returning, but we do not have the right to be angry at someone who spent their entire life in a village or the highlands of Trabzon.
Circling back to my aunt, she is holding a gun because in the highlands, many people, actually everyone, keep a weapon at their homes. Wild animals like boars, bears, and wolves enter the land quite often, hence the need for guns. Women also know how to use weapons, because they need to use them sometimes.