Özde Nalan Köseoğlu received her Ph.D. in 2017 from the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Istanbul University. She advances her academic, artistic and curatorial inquiries through works in theatre, cinema, and class studies. Her research explores themes of threshold/(co)existence, root/home and archive, seeking to expand the questions surrounding these concepts.
We encounter on the thresholds… We collide, transform, scatter, and regather. Through experience, we render that 'place' into space. Therefore, every space becomes a realm of conflict to some extent.
Regardless of whether we are aware of it, we vary and become different with "the power of the thresholds to unite what is separate and to separate what is different”. For each encounter leaves an indelible mark, persisting both within us and throughout the very fabric of the surrounding environment.
The threshold is a passage, a pause, a blurred boundary, an in-betweenness. The threshold simultaneously encompasses the inside and the outside, the private and the public, the apparent and the hidden, the end and the beginning. The traces within the threshold possess a power that goes beyond itself, enabling encounters, intersections, forming contact surfaces, familiarizing with uncertainties and expanding into change. “...The important fact is that the threshold acquires its meaning as a point of both contact and separation through the practices that cross it.” Finds oneself in the arena that lies on the threshold. Trapped in the seemingly safe and private confines of one’s home, one takes refuge on the path of migration and becomes exiled within one’s own body, at times finding liberation within the confines of an imposed prison.
The exhibition "On the Threshold..." endeavors to invert the "repositories of feelings and emotions" within threshold-spaces, each of which serves as a meeting ground. It strives to comprehend how emotions find their place within this repository, how they contend with one another on the surface of contact, how they shape us and how we are shaped by them.
Georg Simmel, cited by Stavros Stavrides, Urban Heterotopia: Towards a City of Thresholds as a Space of Liberation, Istanbul, Sel Yayıncılık, 2016, p. 98.
Stavrides, op. cit., p. 17.
Ann Cvetkovich, cited by Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Istanbul, Sel Yayıncılık, 2015, p. 24.