Rearview Mirror

#15
Shayman Tostakay
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Shayman Tostakay is a darkroom instructor in Ka Atölye. Tostakay's work here provides a perspective on his past. He traces his family bonds and memories during his life in village. Like in every childhood memory, details of place and people change, but the traces themselves remain and they recall past images in the artist's memory.

Tostakay tells in his project text: "I was only 1,5 meters high from the ground, not much. We had this ball we played in our garden back in the village. A real soccer ball, not one of those plastic ones. We used to play all together, cousins, relatives, acquaintances, we used to share our time, but when I went there the next summer I couldn't find that soccer ball in the garden of our country house, as much as I looked for it. It was gone. But now I realize that not only that ball, but many of those people who were together with me at that garden are lost in my inner world or in reality. Now, I can see those old friends and their fellowship only in traces they left on some objects, only as I look back from a rearview mirror."

The name "Shayman Tostakay" is a saying about past and origins, and the artist's pseudonym. This work, although it is finished for Tostakay, his pursuit on the same line continues, because in his words he "only scratches about the same pit..."