Mirkan Deniz, 1990

Art

Jury report

Mirkan Deniz’s installation won over the jury with its pared-down yet highly calibrated approach that tackles complex topics such as remote warfare and the oppression of Turkey’s Kurdish minority without sentimentality and with deliberate economy of means. The work confronts us with a traumatic event—a military tank assault on a private dwelling—conveyed not through an actual image but rather through the exemplars of index and symbol. The precise and restrained tactic of allusion rather than portrayal and pathos opens up potential for further reflection in which the viewer is also invited to participate—an ethics of the gaze, as it were—while the installation creates an expansive and exciting permeability in space.