HERITAGE – Elif Uras
With a background in economics and law, Turkish contemporary artist Elif Uras has always been interested in fairness and equality. Uras combines Islamic tradition and contemporary art in ceramics and paintings that focus on the issues of gender and socio-economic structure.Portrait Photography: Ceren Çalışkan Eker
We are getting to know her better through the word “heritage”.
“The word heritage makes me feel grateful to belong to a geography that has encompassed countless different civilizations and cultures before us.”
When was the last time you used/heard/experienced the word “heritage”?
I use this word when talking about my work, as in “cultural heritage.”
What inherent emotion do you feel in this word?
It makes me feel grateful to belong to a geography that has encompassed countless different civilizations and cultures before us.
How is this word related to you or your work?
A great deal of my inspiration comes from arts and crafts that we have inherited, such as Neolithic sculpture and pottery excavated in Anatolia, Greek vases, Roman mosaics and Seljuk and Ottoman ceramic traditions.
The three words she chooses for our next interviewee are:
geography, antiquity, modernity
Elif Uras (b. 1972, Ankara) attended Brown University and Columbia Law School before earning additional degrees from the School of Visual Arts and Columbia University’s School of the Arts. Now based between New York and Istanbul, she paints and works in ceramic, exploring shifting gender and class structures in a globalised, consumer-driven, neoliberal world. Her paintings contain narratives and social commentary and resemble giant miniatures infused with a combination of Surrealist imagery, Expressionist color schemes and arabesque motifs. Uras’ ceramics, crafted in Iznik where the Ottoman Empire long produced its legendary tiles, examine the conflict between modernity and tradition. Her work has been included in the world-class permanent collections of The Victoria & Albert Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Collezione Maramotti, to name just a few. galerist.com.tr
