WAITING to be a FLOWER UNDERNEATH the FIG TREE

words Goksen Bugra  

photos Gokhan Tanrıover

This week at Photo London, Istanbul-based gallery Bosfor presents a solo exhibition by photographer Gokhan Tanrıover: Waiting to be a Flower Underneath the Fig Tree. Moving between memory, myth and inherited stories, the series traces the artist’s connection to a small village on the Turkish Aegean coast through analogue photography and darkroom printing. Ahead of the presentation, we spoke with Tanrıover about memory, belonging and the slow rituals of analogue photography.

This year you’ll be taking part in Photo London with Bosfor, with a solo presentation. Could you tell us a little about the series Waiting to be a Flower Underneath the Fig Tree, which you’ll be showing there?

Three of my grandparents were born in a small village on the Turkish Aegean coast, scented with fig trees and the salt of the sea, edged by tides and dotted with the empty stone houses of long-abandoned villages. It is a place I never lived in, only visited; a place that now exists for me mostly through stories: histories that shift each time they are told, half-remembered anecdotes, hyperbole, things that may or may not have happened. “Waiting to be a Flower Underneath the Fig Tree” began as a way to step into that landscape and make work from inside it.

Visually, the series moves between the village and what surrounds it: empty stone houses softened by figs growing through their walls, the saline light of the coast, fragments of figures, quieter still lifes built around objects I came across or carried with me. Some images began on long walks through abandoned settlements; others were arranged later, more deliberately, once a story had stayed with me long enough to take form. 

I returned again and again with my medium-format camera and treated the territory as a stage, wandering through it as a partial outsider, anchored only by familial bonds, retelling the stories that surfaced as I walked. The work hinges between fact and fiction, lived history and inherited stories, brushed by myth: the rebirth of Narcissus, the slow demise of Echo. The fig tree threads through all of this. Its flower hides inside the fruit, which felt like a fitting image for a place that exists for me through what was withheld and what was passed on in fragments. Back in the darkroom, the prints add another layer of subjectivity over an already malleable narrative. What I’m constructing, piece by piece, is a new visual family archive. One that doesn’t claim to be true, but tries to be honest.

I TRAVELLED TO THE VILLAGE WHERE THESE STORIES TOOK PLACE AND ENTERED AN INTENSE PERIOD OF MAKING WORK 

In this series, how did family stories and oral narratives become a starting point for you?

The stories were always there, long before I thought of making work from them. Growing up, family gatherings would inevitably circle back to the village, and someone would begin telling a story that everyone had heard before but that nobody ever told the same way twice. Details would shift. New characters would appear. I never knew which parts were true, and after a while I stopped trying to separate fact from embellishment, because the telling itself was the point. 

In some ways, this project grew out of an earlier body of work, Confessionals, where I used my own childhood memories as material. There was a delay of several years while I pursued my master’s and my practice-based research took me elsewhere. But when I relocated to Madrid from London, leaving behind the city where I had lived most of my life, I felt a sharp pang of nostalgia for the idea of home and what it means to me. The village came back into focus.

What pulled me there with urgency was the realisation that my grandmother, the last gatekeeper of these stories, was losing her hold on them. Her dementia was advancing, and the tales I had grown up with, tales in which my ancestors took on the roles of almost legendary characters, were beginning to dissolve. I travelled to the village where these tales took place and spent an intensive period making new work in a way that was entirely new to me. I walked through the landscape looking for physical traces of the stories — the wells, the stone walls, the overgrown paths — and waited for certain ones to find their form. The photograph of the well came together only after several visits, when I finally stood before one whose depth was barely perceptible, holding nothing but dust and the sediment of old wishes.

How has living between Izmir, London, Madrid, and now Barcelona shaped your sense of belonging?

I was born in Izmir and moved to London twice, first as a toddler and then again at the age of ten. I also spent several years in Istanbul early on. Growing up between English and Turkish, I often wasn’t sure which language truly felt like my first. Even now, calling either one my mother tongue feels too definitive, as I’ve never felt fully tied to a single geography or identity. That complicated relationship with language has followed me everywhere. After spending most of my life in London, I moved to Madrid and later to Barcelona, where Catalan became yet another language shaping daily life. I now speak three languages, all with accents of varying strength, which means I’m constantly asked where I’m really from. Over time, I’ve realised my sense of belonging has less to do with geography and more to do with the spaces I build for myself — spaces I allow only a select few into.

IT WAS ONLY DURING MEDICAL SCHOOL THAT THINGS BEGAN TO CRACK OPEN  

How did your transition from medical training—something that takes a long time and a great deal of effort—into photographic art unfold? What did that turning point change in your life?

I think there is a quiet violence in choosing a career as a teenager and being expected to build a life around it. I was good at science, and in the environment I grew up in that was enough to set a direction. Medicine was the obvious path: it was respected, demanding, and rewarded the kind of discipline I had. What I could name, even then, was that I loved to draw. But in my family, as in many others, the arts were never presented as something you could truly make a living from. It was only during medical school that things began to crack open. I started working with artists and photographers, not behind the camera but in front of it, modelling for life drawing classes, taking part in performances, lending my body to other people’s projects. I was fascinated by the decisions they were making, the way they constructed an image or a gesture, and over time I found myself wanting to be the one making those decisions rather than simply being shaped by them.

I bought a camera.  I photographed compulsively, without method, which is almost unrecognisable from the way I work now. The decision to leave medicine was not gradual; it was sharp, almost impulsive, though I think it had been building beneath the surface for a long time. I didn’t want to keep treating photography as an escape from a life that left me anxious and depleted. I wanted it to become the life itself. Once I made that shift, photography stopped being the place I fled to and became the place I live in.