Siir's metaphors are clearly related in appearence with the popular science-fiction alien stereotypes. These pictures create a plastic world of itself, like modern virtual stories of Holywood, but they are still "paintings" and retain the uniqueness of art objects as we are used to it.

The brownish row paper that she uses in these paintings, limit the possibilities of colors and create a sepia-like timelessness.

Metaphors with Attitude

What if metaphors, these docile creatures of our expressions declared their autonomy and looked back at us ... with defiance.

This is what I have dreamed of. Maybe out of solidarity with things that never speak for themselves; maybe because I see myself as a living metaphor of things that even I don’t know.

Excerpt from Introductory Text, February 24th, 2002 - Vienna Intercultural Theatre, Personal Exhibition

Being There

Not all those who dare to migrate out of their home-worlds can continue as lucky and innocent as the gardener hero of Jerzy Kosinski's great novel "being there".

Living in an ageing European capital like Vienna, being young, being Turkish, being woman, being an "auslander", resorting to speaking English against an unwelcoming and disbelieving society that punishes broken German and dignity ... It is like being without coordinates to take hold of. It is maybe like being an American Indian in 20th century. Living under a stubborn rain of metaphors which you breathlessly work to relate to yourself, and resist.

Metaphors with attitude can be considered as Siir's own platoon to defend her identity against that infinite metaphorical attack of a civilization that likes to define you, classify you, and forces you to play a cliché.

Metaphors with attitude, these explicitly female creatures, look strangely more human than the Homo Sapiens itself which populates our globe and outnumbers any other species that may have choosen this planet as home.

It is as though, we wake up from a long dream and find ourselves as the aliens that invaded a blue world, and filled it with cement, barbed wire, and burned fossil fuel ... And these metaphors with attitude, the natives of the planet that we pushed into reservation camps and gettos, still looking at us with defiance.

Özcan ÖZBILGE