Born in 1992 in İzmir, Oğulcan Arslan completed his undergraduate education at Marmara University Fine Arts Faculty Photography Department between 2016-2020. He has been continuing his postgraduate education at Marmara University Fine Arts Institute Photography Department since 2020.
“I am a photographer and visual storyteller who constantly renews himself and focuses on development. My goal is not to fully perceive or change the world, but to add meaning to my world. I believe that this humane behavior triggers my creativity and helps me to reflect my imagination on photography. I’m pretty close to directly describing the world as I perceive it.”
Oğulcan Arslan’s photographs in the “Put on My Geneva Armor” series, in which a foggy turquoise color predominates, are like pages torn from his diary and put together. As Arslan explains, each photograph represents a letter, a word, and sometimes a punctuation mark; therefore, the diptych, triptych and single photographs we encounter are also open to reading as texts.
The pieces of Arslan’s narrative, which do not follow a chronological order, echo each other in a certain manner and document the artist’s journey in total. Using photography as a means of making sense of his life and conveying his feelings that he cannot express verbally, Arslan captures images to reflect his momentary perception, the feelings he experiences there and then. The landscapes and details filtered through his lens, can be interpreted by themselves or in new fictions sometimes with double or triple superimpositions, revealing a poetic mosaic in the whole.
The artist’s “Pearl” series, on the other hand, focuses on the horses that are released from their stables after waking up in the morning and roaming freely on the island until 6 o’clock in the afternoon, when they are not working, carrying people on horse carriages in Burgazada. As John Berger said, animals are born, have intuition, and are mortal, in this respect they are human-like. They have secrets that are appealing to humans in particular, not like the secrets of caves, mountains and seas. The search in the artist’s observations are, in a way, the traces of this secret.
