Tuba Öztekin Köymen
Tuba Öztekin Köymen is an artist, educator and designer who lives and works in the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex. She was born in Turkey and graduated in 1995 from the Department of Graphic Design at Bilkent University. In 1999, she was awarded an MFA in Photography and Digital imaging by the Maryland Institute College of Art.
Köymen has had solo exhibitions locally and internationally in museums and galleries including the Center of Documentary Studies at Duke University, Light Factory (North Carolina), Austin College (Sherman, Texas), and the Museum Center in Baku, Azerbaijan. She has organized and assisted in the organization of exhibitions of photography and art — including the Istanbul Biennial — and has led or participated in workshops, collaborative projects, and group exhibitions nationally and internationally.
Köymen’s art calls attention to human nature by offering candid scenes of everyday life through the media of photography, mixed media and photo based installations. Working across the gamut of photographic processes — from alternative to digital — Köymen centers on issues arising from place, culture and social interaction. Her perspective is humanistic and universalizing; she regards these issues to be common territory for all human beings.
Köymen taught as an adjunct professor at Texas Christian University for several years and as a visiting professor at Austin College in Sherman, Texas in 2014. Currently, she is working at the Kimbell Art Museum as an educator and as an adjunct faculty at Eastfield College.
Quiddity
|ˈkwidətē| noun
the inherent nature or essence of someone or something.
If we think of the photograph as an extraction and abstraction from time and space, I am interested in creating a new space and time for the photographic image. I achieved the goal in my installations and am now exploring this problem with multi-media work. I layer the un-manipulated photograph with paint and other media that register many passages of time and construct a new environment for the image. I am merging traditional photography practices with printmaking and digital transformation. In this new body of work the photographs are all hand manipulated immediately after printing by using abrasives, inks, blushing or sprayed chemicals to create different surfaces such as blistering, cracking, or peeling. I am interested in challenging photography's origins as a means of "fixing" the image by creating images that can read as unstable. The impression I want to create is of an image-world in flux.
I also want to provoke the question – what is it? “Quiddity”. The term derives from the Latin word quidditas, which was used by the medieval scholastics as a literal translation of the equivalent term in Aristotle's Greek to ti ên einai (τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι) or "the what it was to be (a given thing)". It describes properties that a particular substance shares with others of its kind. The question "what (quid) is it?" asks for a general description by way of commonality. This question reflects the viewer’s attempts to understand the essential nature or quality of something, to establish what makes it different and distinct from other things. In short, what is its identity? This is the question I am asking in all my work.
To see more of Tuba Koymen's work, follow the link below