Kronenboden

Roommates
Selim Eyuboglu and Sevgi Ortac, in collaboration with Evrim Kaya

Roommates is about the ordinary lives of two women, sharing the same apartment. The project renders a series of photographs that gather together the recollections of a personal experience, which is perpetually revised, and a cinematic re-imagination of life as two incongruous narratives. Cinematic re-imagination here implies the archetypal, thrilling and glamorized narration of mainstream cinema that appeals to our collective memory of outstanding scenes. Roommates, thereby draws upon cinematic icons of proximity, intimacy, desire, and hatred.
Roommates intermingles the taken-for-granted realism of photography and the make-believe realism of cinema. The viewer enters the image, knowing the roommates are constructed through cinematic frames, which imply greater narratives, but draw upon “real” experiences of the tensions arising from those living in close quarters.

To represent the continuation of such apprehension in photographs, each still is composed like a cinematic frame, emulating its partiality, its emphasis on the off-screen space and the impelling postures of the characters. Thus, for example, to lay emphasis on the roommates’ lives in flux, the photographs accentuate the prior or the succeeding instances of daily occurrences. However, the cinema’s capacity for dramatization is still needed to emotively express their inner violence underneath those inconsequential moments. In their ostensibly “real” world, the roommates are unable to express their conflict without the iconic makeup of narrative cinema, provided in the “imaginative” world of the screen.