Ömer Tevfik Erten, Turkiye, SECOND PLACE WINNER
We are leaving behind a period where borders have been redrawn and profound crises facing the earth have come to light. The year 2024 has forced us to confront both physical and existential boundaries through the genocide in Gaza, the devastating effects of climate disasters, and endless wars. Borders are not merely geographical lines; they are wounds through which we explore who we are and who we might become.
Every border is a wound, and in that wound lies the beginning of both pain and healing. This year has allowed me to look into these wounds and explore their healing power through my art.
At the heart of my art lies the PROTECTOR series, reflecting the healing and transformative power of borders. As Gloria Anzaldúa emphasized, borders are not solely physical; they are spaces where identities, cultures, and social norms clash. My identity has also taken shape within these borders. The solitude brought by being both inside and outside is, at the same time, a form of liberation. Like Anzaldúa’s mestiza consciousness, these boundaries have given me the opportunity to rediscover my identity. When I feel confined by “us” and “them,” I recognize the fluidity of my identity and the fragility of these borders.
During the year, I have learned that crossing borders is not a liberation but an act of destruction. And destruction calls forth the courage to create. Real life is found within these borders, amidst chaos. Just as crossing borders is a choice, so is existing within their ambiguity. Albert Camus’s philosophy of the absurd added profound meaning to this existential struggle. Like Sisyphus endlessly pushing the stone uphill, I found myself returning to the borders each time I attempted to transgress them. This process reminded me of the possibility of embracing borders rather than breaking them. For Sisyphus, border transgression was not about surpassing the gods’ punishment but rather about persisting in defiance of it.
Desire, chaos, death, and rebirth have been indispensable elements of my life. The images I create in my art are both witnesses to this process and forces that disrupt and reconstruct it. The figures in the PROTECTOR series are symbols carrying the stories of the lost, the suicides, and the queer+ survivors. They have become images of resistance against social norms, embodying the rebirth of memory.
Ömer Tevfik Erten (ÖTE)
“The New Mestiza; ‘I am a Border Woman’, 7×12 cm, 2024
Composite photograph on Hahnemühle paper
Antiheroes understand that social rules define borders, not freedom. We exist not through the approval of others but within or beyond the boundaries of our own identities. George Bataille’s cycle of executioner and victim sheds light on the antihero’s complex relationship with social boundaries. The antihero, both victim and executioner, transgresses, questions, and dismantles these borders. In this cycle of destruction and rebirth, they continuously re-create themselves. Bataille’s myths of community and the Acéphale (headless figure) offer a profound perspective on the antihero’s relationship with social structures. The Acéphale symbolizes the individual’s freedom achieved by rejecting the yoke of social rules and authority.
The antihero, too, carries this search for headlessness; they reject the imposed boundaries of society and reach a unique, undefinable freedom. As Zeynep Sayın emphasizes in her teachings, the line is a witness to a depth that reflects on the surface yet transcends itself; it both sets a boundary and invites us to transcend it. The line is not merely a boundary defining the surface; it is also a mark that reveals the depths of that surface, bringing the hidden into visibility.
This transitional space between visible and invisible carries us to the unknown beyond borders, to what lies beyond the line. Because even if there is no meaning, life itself continues to exist in this void. In this sense, we can also see antiheroism as an effort to find one’s place in the chaotic nature of existence.
By the end of this process, resistance and surrender became inseparable for me. In my art, the antihero is a rebel shaped between the archetypes of the sacred virgin and the whore, rejecting societal expectations. Goddesses and antiheroes are figures in my art, resisting in the midst of chaos in an absurd world. As they walk the fine line between life and death, they defy societal norms and redefine their own existence. My images were reborn in chaotic cycles. Like me.
In 2024, the world made me realize that instead of tearing down every boundary, sometimes existing within the voids of these lines is also an act of transgression. Perhaps this transgression required a new birth. As the ouroboros completes its cycle within me, I embrace myself with compassion. And now, if I take one more step, love and death will call out to each other.
