Güler Ates Present and Absent Exhibition

Marcelle Joseph Projects proudly presents Present and Absent, a solo exhibition featuring a new series of photographs by Turkish artist Güler Ates taken in the historic rooms of Great Fosters, a former royal hunting lodge in Surrey dating back to 1550.

Güler’s photographs were taken in the majestic settings of the Italian Room, Panel II Room and the Tapestry Room at Great Fosters, complete with 17th century Flemish tapestries and a carved wooden Jacobean chimneypiece. The Italian Room is finished with carved Quattrocentro doors and damask covered walls.

The darkness in the rooms, a consequence of the Tudor architecture as well as being inspired by Dutch Old Master paintings, plays a significant role in the work of Ates, whose ambiguously veiled female figures illuminate against the dramatic backdrop of rich, heavy drapery. The extreme contrast is one element employed by the artist in order to create the fluid, floating apparitions that have become synonymous with Ates’ work. Her body of work comments on the Western notion of Orientalism and the effects of the cross pollination of

cultures on female identity and architecture. Güler says, ‘Manifestations of my work are realised through performance and site-responsive activities that merge Eastern and Western sensibilities.’ Ates questions the relationship between the veil and the West, and by setting the female veiled figure within a lush European interior, she subtly refers to the West’s mistaken ‘far-right’ interpretation of the veiled woman and refers back to the European traditions of veiled women as found in the work of Old Masters such as Vermeer. Important to
her artistic process, Ates sources the fabric and makes all of the luscious silk costumes worn by the model she photographs in her work after scrupulous research into the history of the building and the time when it was built.

Born in 1977 in Eastern Turkey, Güler Ates has been living and working in London for the past 13 years. She graduated in 2008 from the Royal College of Art with an MA in Printmaking. That same year, her work was featured in the New Contemporaries show. Currently, she is Digital Print Tutor at the Royal Academy Schools. Her work can be found in the Victoria & Albert Museum’s print collection and was recently shown in the 2011 Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy. She was the first artist-in-residence at the Leighton House Museum after it refurbishment in 2010 where she exhibited her body of work from that residency.

Great Fosters has been the splendid home to many an English nobleman with regal connections, and was once a hunting lodge for Henry VIII, and his daughter Elizabeth, whose royal crest can still be found above the main porch, dated 1598. The majestic property continued to change hands throughout history, before becoming a hotel in 1930.