Beral Madra, February 2022

A myth is a way of making sense in a senseless world. Myths are narrative patterns that give significance to our existence.
Rollo May

The pictures created by Nazan Azeri, using a unique drawing technique utilizing blue and red acrylic ink on hand-made paper, combines the concepts of woman, child, and nature. All the plant and animal images surrounding the woman figures as well as the embryo and child images direct the gaze towards the meanings of an imaginary world provided by a mythological memory. The various animals, birds, flies, plants and the woman and child figures associated with these are the results of an inspiration of a few weeks full of tranquility and silence spent at an artist guesthouse at the Ayvalık branch of Gate27. The most important characteristic of this guesthouse is that it is located amidst the nature of the well-preserved Northern Aegean. As is indicated by Nazan Azeri herself, being by herself in an evident silence and tranquility in this nature and climate has enabled her to create these pictures. The texture technique utilized in creating these images individually and binding them together is a powerful communication tool. Texture has always been functional in enabling the artist to understand herself; from this perspective, these pictures have a remedial meaning associated with one’s internal journey in association with experiencing humanity’s internal journey in the process of the pandemic we have been going through for two years. 

The artist using the mythological images with a Freudian analysis in order to give meaning to and to interpret the human consciousness and emotions has been a method utilized by the artists since Modernism to our day. For example, Surrealists have depicted the journey of Theseus within the labyrinth in Cretan Mythology as a journey to the depths of the mind and the instincts of human beings; Theseus overcoming the Minotaur is the discovery of his own self.

Mythological narratives, figures and symbols provide the artists with a wide range of visual metaphors as well as an endless opportunity to reinterpret them. Mythological images can constantly change in the manner most appropriate for the need of the artists to express themselves, but the main topics provided for in the myths remain unchanged. Even though myths seem detached from reality, the universal truths of the human condition lie right underneath the surface of these narratives. Also, even though mythology contains subject matters that pertain to humans, it is a tool for understanding life with a philosophical query and guides the artists towards creating metaphorical images to treat the truth of their own realities.

In the comprehensive exhibition held by Nazan Azeri in 2019, she displayed her focus on the identities of being a woman and a child throughout her years of art creation. The display of the naked woman figures surrounded by child and nature images in these series of painting also becomes a part of the conceptual framework of the same intellectual and emotional creation. Azeri, as always, with a delicately interwoven search for the truth and this time, using mythological images, brings the circle of intervention acquired by the cliched and the commodified values of the woman and child identities as well as these identities themselves in a post-truth discourse to the forefront. The spectator, with these images that empower the impact of art on the imagination and the unconscious, witnesses Nazan Azeri searching for an answer with a creative process that extends through a time frame of 25 years to the problems of the concept of family conflicting with certain ideological interests, the woman and child identities and rights being constantly corroded and the environmental issues threatening the lives of human beings.

* Rollo May, Psychotherapist, and the Author of “The Cry for Myth”