In the ongoing body of work titled Every Name in history is I and I is Other, İz Öztat fabricates the (auto)biography of Zişan (1894-1970), who appears to her as a historical figure, a ghost, and an alter ego. She takes on Zişan’s archives and interprets them through her practice to propose a complex temporality where a suppressed past haunts an increasingly authoritarian present.
The chapter titled Boo Boo feeds off the research process that seeks to imagine the love affair between Zişan and Vita (Sackville-West), who meet in Istanbul, in 1913. While Zişan works at the photography studio of her father Dikran Bey, Vita comes in to have her photograph taken. They fall in love at first sight. During the one-year period when Vita lives in Istanbul, they spend time in the photography studio, imagining each other in the representations they produce, getting to know each other’s desires, and documenting their love.
In the video, Iz and Ra, whose assigned genders are female, transform this story into a site of research, in which they are both themselves as well as Zişan and Vita. The setting and the scenes are informed by Orientalist representations from the beginning of the 20th century. The video playfully subverts the orientalist fantasies shaped both by the colonial gaze and their current neo-Ottoman renditions. The scenes depicted in the video oscillate between improvisation, rehearsal, and performance. The work negotiates the orientalist gaze that is inherently voyeuristic. The world of references employed by the artists relies on the codes of a situated queer culture. The video is accompanied by a contract between İz & Ra, in which their improvisational collaborative process is consensually negotiated.
