In this desktop-film, the Sudanese Turkish artist, Deniz Pasha, together with her friends Jazmine Mussington and Mario Lamar, looks at the Western orientalist-style depictions of the Ottoman harem and visually analyzes the black people’s representations, who are mostly left in shadow, covered, and unidentifiable. On the computer screen page of Photoshop, as an act to nullify the racial degradation, she revises those representations with pictures of contemporary Black people living in Turkey.
Deniz Pasha is an artist living and working in Istanbul. Her heritage is Sudanese and Turkish, though before living here, she lived in Dubai and London for most of my life. Her subject is rooted in black feminism, oscillating between historical forced migration, and the current migration crisis. She looks at post-coloniality by way of being a third culture child. Witnessing what her family has had to endure regarding their race, and Africanness has influenced her outlook on the world and the generational trauma she carries is something she tries to work through with regard to her work.
More about Deniz Pasha
The Global Platform for Middle East Arts
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