Dear Mom

  • Year 2019
  • Text "Dear Mom" consists of six Gmail screenshots of emails sent between me and my mother back in 2012. It was our first communication after a period of time that I thought I contracted HIV. The original work is in Turkish, like the correspondence was, but English translated version is available.
  • Press “Sifting through private archives is one way to fight public condemnation. Ardıl Yalınkılıç’s Dear Mom, 2018, drew on a 2012 email correspondence between the artist and his mother. Yalınkılıç had annotated the printed-out emails so that the apprehension he felt then, as he underwent two HIV tests (the first positive, the second negative), was intertwined with present anxieties about its expression. With its speciality of time and tone, the email thread appeared externally unalterable, but Yalınkılıç countered this sense of immutability by, as it were, hacking into his textual past with his handwritten commentary.” Kaya Genc, Artforum April 2019
  • Commissioned by “Positive Space” at Operation Room, Istanbul / Turkey, curated by: Alper Turan

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