Iz Öztat: Underbelly

Underbelly, by Iz Öztat, is an exhibition that ran from February to May at Zilberman Istanbul, and featured themes from across the artist’s oeuvre musing on queer sculpture and art history through a variety of media, including video, installation, drawing and writing. This review examines and critiques the role of the artist’s biography and identity in the production and archiving of their work, foregrounding issues of cultural heritage and personal intimacy despite divisions of nationality, gender, and other limitations to the canonization of non-Western perspectives on the fringes of Europe. Öztat’s alter ego, ghost and muse, the character Zisan, parallels her own narratives of exile, as the fictive daughter of an Armenian photographer who flees Istanbul in 1915 and whose presence embodies forgotten victims of genocide, patriarchy and nationalism.