GÜLEN RITA
TOPALOGLU

WORKSBIO
People in their bedrooms
St. George
Lazistan
Between


Personal projects
- Three women





















During the project, I examined my personal relationship with my mother and sister—a relationship that has been challenging and restrictive but also one of the most important in my life. In my work, I explore emotions, patterns of behavior, and the sense of belonging and alienation.

When facing my mother and sister with the camera, I felt like a detached fragment, as if I were not present at all or somehow an insignificant part of it all. I realized I had unintentionally placed myself in a kind of liminal space. Was I the observer or the observed? Working on the project has revealed a lot about our relationship, tensions of which I would likely still be unaware had I chosen to photograph something else.

Drawing on Siri Hustvedt's essay 'Mothers, fathers and others; A Walk with my mother,' she notes, 'the very happy mom' is an imaginary being, a maternal pigment used as a gilded hammer to beat the real mother into shape’