Cigdem Aydemir

Cigdem Aydemir:

My name is Cigdem Aydemir and I created the work Veils on Veils. I’m a performance, video and installation artist and I often create work that comments on power structures in society and the impacts these have on the way we behave and think.

I’m a proud Muslim woman. I wore a headscarf for many years of my life, particularly in my teenage years. And so even though I don’t wear a veil today, wearing the veil in my artworks is important because it helps me to connect with my identity as a Muslim woman and also helps me to unpack some of the experiences I had as a teenager and as an adult. I really like the idea that art can be many things at once, so, you know, it’s beautiful, it’s political, it’s strange, it’s funny, it’s all of these things at once and I like to create work that’s like that as well.

Often people think of my practice as activism but I’m not necessarily trying to change anyone’s opinion, I think what’s much more interesting for me is that I like to think critically - and I like my audience to think critically - about the way we behave and think and the reasons why we do the things that we do.

In Veils on Veils, I’m looking at the hairstyle as a marker of Western femaleness. Often when we think about exposing hair it’s considered the most natural and normal thing to do. Well actually what we know is that hairstyles carry lots of meaning, particularly coming from the perspective of a veil-wearer or a Muslim woman. So, if you like, the hairstyle could be considered a veil: something that you wear, something that you put on, something that carries meaning. So that’s what I’m interested in.

The headpieces themselves look really camp and kitsch and I was interested in this because I love the way drag performers parody the gender binary. They’re presenting this idealised version of femininity or masculinity and what makes it so funny is that we know there is no singular ideal of the ideal female or the ideal male. In my work I’m trying to do something similar, I’m parodying the notion that there is this this idealised Western female that we should all, as women, be aspiring to.

When I saw the screen I initially thought of it as a billboard. It’s really large and it’s got high exposure, I thought it would be the kind of place where you’d see a fashion advertisement or a beauty advertisement, so this made me think of creating something that would blur the lines between art and advertising, so when you saw the work you couldn’t really tell if it was one or the other.

There’s three videos and they’re each about 30 seconds. They’re designed to be slotted in between other video works, so it’s not something you can necessarily plan to see, but something you’ll happen to see when you go past it.

The reason why I’m interested in the incidental-ness or that moment when you’re not necessarily thinking is because I think that moment is full of potential. It’s when we’re on autopilot, we’re not necessarily thinking about why we’re doing things and that’s what I want to explore - it’s the reason why we do those things that we don’t think about.

I also want to create an opportunity where we can momentarily step out of the everyday and experience something unusual and different.