Green Art Gallery Dubai presents Nazif Topcuoglu at ART Dubai 2010

Nazif Topçuoğlu creates highly staged, theatrical works typically featuring young girls
living in lavish period backdrops. They play symbolic roles and become almost akin to
Old Master paintings with their glowing skin and richly coloured garments. In many
aspects, photography is in dialogue with the history of painting, whilst also recalling the
world of theatre.

The constant preoccupation with time, memory and loss have long been core to Nazifʼs
practice. He worries about our tenuous grip on existence, how quickly life and our ideals
can slip through our fingers. Through his constant references to art history along with
the writings of authors like Marcel Proust, Vladimir Nabokav and Lewis Carrol, he
attempts to preserve the past on his camera film.

However, the contemporary world inhabits these staged pasts, with works suggesting
both a past scene and a modern day event we can read about in the news. There is
often a characteristic duality in his work; hovering between innocence and experience,
passivity and aggression, masculinity and femininity.

Born in 1953, Nazif Topçuoğlu graduated with a Masters degree from the Institute of
Design in Chicago in 1981. Since then he has exhibited worldwide and has published 3
books on the history and criticism of photography. Nazifʼs work was included in the
Turkish pavillion during the 50th Venice biennale in 2003 and he has held several solo
shows both in Istanbul and abroad. Most recently he participated in the Solo Project in
Basel in 2009 and was included in the group show entitled “ A Subjective Panorama of
Contemporary Turkish Photography” as part of the Turkish Cultural Season in Paris at
the Maison de Metallos in November 2009. Nazifʼs works are part of museums and in
private and public art collections of which most notable are JPMorgan-Chase, USA,
Marion and Guy Naggar, London, UK, Schürmann, Germany, Sema and Barbaros
Çağa, Istanbul, Fotocollectie Hoboken Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands and
the Reflex Miniature Museum of Contemporary Art, Amsterdam, Netherlands. His work
is included in several significant publications on contemporary art including Vitamin Ph:
New Perspectives in Photography, published by Phaidon in 2006 and Userʼs Manual:
Contemporary Art in Turkey 1986-2006, published by art-ist in 2007. He will also be
included in the upcoming publication entitled “Unleashed: Contemporary Art from
Turkey” to be published by Transglobe Publishing in May 2010.