Water figures prominently in the practice of Turkish artist Sena Başöz – ebb and flow, connection and separation, shimmering one moment and disappearing the next. One of Başöz’s first forays into art was a series of videos exploring feelings of alienation, including Swim Through II, 2009. The work depicts the artist wearing a bathing suit and goggles, making her way rambling across the floor of the Reuters office in Istanbul where she once worked as a data manager. Feeling like a fish out of water, this is where she longs to go, flowing from her office job into the uncharted oceans of public art.
This work and other firsts are on display in Başöz’s latest exhibition, “Possibilities for Healing”, alongside a new two-channel video titled Seabird, 2023, in which the artist takes a ferry across the Bosphorus Strait from Istanbul and reaches out to distant shipping containers. As if torn from the horizon, the crates are reproduced, now the size of candies, by the hand of the artist. Başöz swallows the miniaturized cubes, a gesture mimicking the disruption of world trade during the Covid-19 pandemic. In the second half of the video, the scale shifts in the opposite direction, showing Başöz wandering around a dock – a fun-sized consumer surrounded by massive goods.
Nearby, the installation A consolation, 2020 – for which Başöz shredded documents and photographs from his own archive and applied seaweed to the countless strands of paper fragments – is displayed in a pile in the corner of the gallery. A video monitor placed among the rubbish shows leaves of Posidonia oceanica, an algae native to Mediterranean waters, swaying in the water current.
Concluding the show is the photographic installation Jump into the future, 2023, which reuses archival footage by pioneering Turkish photographer Selahattin Giz of athletes in various states of motion. Başöz arranged the enlarged reproductions on a white wall, among them the image of an unidentified swimmer, diving into a sea of negative space in a pose anticipating that of Yves Klein. Jump into the void, 1960. Her body seems to have rid itself of all doubt before embracing the unknown.
