2001, Video Installation , 20’03”
Developed for a Turkish bath in the Bulgarian city of Plovdiv
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In her video installation, we see two young women talking in the ambience of a classic Turkish bath. Their conversation, although in a foreign (Turkish) language, seems to us like endless and distracted chatter, about anything and everything. However, what begins as a usual dialogue situation ends with an ironic plot in a completely opposite way: a critical judgment of the social space created by mutual communication. It is a space where intimacy is interrupted and publicly exposed to the indiscreet and curious gaze of the audience. We, as observers of this scene, enter not only the intimate space of its protagonists, but also the situation of their private conversation about completely personal matters (about what it means to be a woman today, about men, their attitudes, about work, ...). Hamam, in this sense, represents a paradoxical zone of human relations: it can be experienced, in a negative way, as a space of mutual exclusivity, while on the other hand, in a positive way, it can be understood as a space in which the only possible conduct a democratic dialogue about social injustice and various forms of exclusivity.