Nezir KORKMAZ

I was born on February 27, 1954 in Hirit, a small village lost in the mountains of eastern Turkey. My native language is Kurdish. In Hirit, when I was 6 months old, a misfortune happened that forced us to leave our hometown and completely turned our lives upside down.

I had never seen a car in my life until I was 7. But in my village, where there was no school, pencils, paper and everyone was illiterate, I began to draw at the same age I began to walk. With charcoal and other materials. ___________________________________________________

My philosophy:

Ever since man invented the first tool many years ago, he has never stopped developing the technology of his predecessors.

Modern household items and countless work tools invade our daily lives. The television we watch, the telephone that transmits our voice thousands of miles, the electricity that turns night into day, sometimes a denture, a battery placed under our skin, the eye of a dead stranger installed in our socket that gives us sight. Cars, ships, planes, weapons of war, space, our interplanetary travel, bombs of all kinds: atomic, nuclear, biological. Skyscrapers, computers, industrial and military research centers, robots, not to mention the tens of thousands of factories needed to produce them, and to manage all this, millions of human brains in constant activity.

For me, the time has come to take up this topic, a new reference point, a parallel life, a “nature” created by man piecemeal, it is called “technology”, it is not alive, but it is continuous and irreversible.

Behind my portraits, I wanted to hide a mass of information and life in all its manifestations. “Man + Technology + Nature” in a unique concept. Without a dividing line, as if it were the birth of a "biomechanical" being. In my opinion, our inventions have become our sixth sense, our third arms and legs, our wings, our eyes, our brain for performing certain tasks, now we have become inseparable.

Sometimes I had to change the same face more than 20 times. I wanted to create a unique face. A man with all his cultural and technological heritage. A man with his sense of insecurity, his joy and his fears, which symbolize our advanced technology, but also the inevitable consequences associated with this modernization, sometimes too advanced and often negative for the fragile balance of our dear nature. Everything is around him, but no one is with him. He has every reason to be afraid, because he is the one who sees everything, hears everything, knows everything. Carrying the entire weight of his time on his shoulders, a man is a breathing machine, but remains first and foremost a man.

The stakes are getting higher and higher. Even the "biggest" of them unite to become "giants". Man as an individual is reduced to a "logo" or "icon", one icon among 6 billion already existing. "A small individual" or "a small state" today has no meaning at all, or at least has less and less meaning. But each person in his "individual property" has features and wealth that are different from the features and wealth of others...