İnci Eviner, 1956

Born in 1956 in Ankara, İnci Eviner completed her undergraduate education in the Painting Department of the Istanbul State Academy of Fine Arts in 1980 and received her PhD degree from Mimar Sinan University's Faculty of Fine Arts in 1987. Istanbul Modern's 2016 İnci Eviner retrospective work titled "Who's inside you?" showcased the artist's creative process from the 1980s to the present. In 2019, Eviner created a site-specific work for the Pavilion of Turkey at the 58th Venice Biennial entitled “We, Elsewhere”. The artist lives and works in Istanbul.

Eviner's recent works add photography, video, installation and other forms of expression to the painting, drawing and patterns that dominate her early work. Images that she revealed through her drawings over the years do not disappear; on the contrary, their presence not only becomes stronger, they reappear again and again as she interprets them in different disciplines. These images – which sometimes appear as limbs, sometimes as faces, sometimes as objects, and sometimes as tools – come together to play a role in completely different stories without becoming detached from their original starting points. Eviner interprets these images using ink, leather, copper, sound, poetry and light. Taking into account history, philosophy, architecture and art history, she re-examines cultural codes, gender, issues of power, and the situation of those who have trouble finding their place in society, who lack power, and who are excluded from society.

İnci Eviner’s installation “New Citizen I-II-III” invites us to question our attitudes about traditional representation. By juxtaposing European wallpaper tradition with the decorations on Ottoman tiles, Eviner highlights the political charge that lies within the visual lexicon of tradition. She reinterprets anonymous signs, ideograms, symbols and patterns by using the motif of the wall and establishes a relationship between tradition and the moving image in the three videos that play a crucial role in the installation. Eviner also provides new possibilities of existence to girls whom she thinks to have been “imprisoned” in postcards from Paris and Istanbul. Recently exhibited at the MAC/VAL Museum of Contemporary Art in Paris, “New Citizen” is an interesting example of how a contemporary artist can respond to tradition