the life and death of a player

I realized I didn’t introduce myself at my first post. My name is Ege Okal and I’m studying Visual Arts and Visual Communication Design in Sabanci University in Istanbul, Turkey. I’m also assisting the photographer Nazif Topcuoglu. Well that’s what is written on my label.

When it comes to the unwritten things, I usually prefer ambiguity. The gender, sexual orientation, religion, age…etc. My name “Ege” is unisex and it’s mostly used by men (I know by saying that I ruined my ambiguity about my sex). I always have troubles when I buy tickets, they always put Mr. before my name or when I e-mail someone I get responded how a man gets responded, I can sense the big behavior difference towards men and women. And I like using that!

The thing is all the female artist around me who are deeply committed to deviantART (I’m glad I’m over that phase), use their sexuality as a weapon. Back then I didn’t have any idea about art, I was just loving the idea of the lives of the artists and I saw that the sexuality made those people popular. I’m not talking about the playmate kind of sexuality. Those people, mostly those girls were artists and/or seemed to be intellectuals. But they were just some narcissist girls who liked the male attention and have no idea about making art. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy self-portraits, I enjoy nude art and I’m not against the sexuality but the style I’m talking about is something else. And when you glance at their work you can easily say that the artist is a narcissist female who is using her sexuality and there is nothing that makes people think, it’s empty.

I didn’t want to be a that kind of artist, so I proved myself that it is easy to produce the same kind of art. I shot myself a thousand times and desaturated the photos, I threw a couple of Indie rock crap at the background and that was it! This way I improved my style. I proved myself that I am able to do those things because back then I didn’t know the photoshop effects they used and I was envying them. But now I choose not to do those effects and it makes me happy!