Born in Roanoke, Virginia in 1946, Nancy Atakan studied art at Mary Washington College in that state, then moved to Turkey when she was twenty-three. She has lived in the same Istanbul apartment since 1969. While she is now well known in Istanbul as a conceptual artist with a penchant for collaborative endeavors, in the 1970s and 1980s Atakan was an unknown painter to the clear. Moon as an art teacher at a local high school. school. During those frustrating years, she was rejected by gallery owners and art prize juries. Instigated by a 2022 documentary by Dilek Aydın about his practice, Atakan has delved into his paintings from this era and produced a new body of work that harmonizes the old with the new. The embroideries, fabric collages, watercolors and installations in her personal exhibition “Scent of Time” have woven an aesthetic of memory.
Loneliness continues, 2022, a substantial piece of embroidery made of felt and needlework, hangs alongside three watercolors from 1987 that depict long-legged, blurred-faced nudes in states of isolation. Transporting and echoing the loneliness felt by the artist in the 1980s in our time of pandemic, Atakan stitched the solitary figure from one of these watercolors, Insidein embroidery and placed a smartphone in her hand.
time window2022, is inspired by a 1983 watercolor titled Window, also featured in the show. The older work depicts plants, pots and a solitary tree seen from a distance through a window; the new image, by contrast, made of old fabrics and embroidery donated to the artist by friends and relatives, features blooming flowers ecstatically coming to the fore, the sad window demoted to the background. The sewing technique of the present in the past found its most striking expression in a larger work, Cliché difficult 3 (quilt with wedding vows), 2019, which used as a canvas an American patchwork made in 1940 by the artist’s grandmother and great-aunt and given as a wedding gift to her parents. Atakan added patches with colorful patterns as well as illustrations of family photos and wedding vows (LOVE TILL DEATH DO US PART). Elsewhere, she paired two patches, SICKNESS and HEALTH, with scenes depicting her own high school graduation and the treatment she recently underwent for cancer.
Transfiguring Atakan’s personal stories in a different way was the installation In search of the smell of time, 2022. Here, Atakan has placed fabric in an embroidery hoop, decorating the edge of this circular frame with linked needlepoint designs. In the center of the frame, she projects a three-minute video showing shots of the artist interacting with antique clocks of various shapes and designs rotating on a round table. On the soundtrack, dozens of timepieces tick away as Atakan ponders “remembering the future in fluid time” and her career-long tactic of thinking about what she calls “movement circular” and “circular thoughts” through jumps and silences. Embracing both old and new, “Scent of time” chronicled, at its own contemplative pace, the past and present practice of this pillar of the Turkish art scene.
