Green Art Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of "Consolation", a solo show for Turkish photographer Nazif Topçuoğlu, marking the Istanbul-based artist's first appearance in the Middle East.

The exhibition will encompass new works in addition to those developed in his earlier series including "Readers", "Curiosity & Experience" and "New World".

Topçuoğlu creates highly staged, theatrical works typically featuring young girls living in lavish period backdrops. They play symbolic roles and become almost akin to Old Master paintings with their glowing skin and richly coloured garments. In many aspects, photography is in dialogue with the history of painting, whilst also recalling the world of theatre.

The underlying thread in his work is a constant preoccupation with time, memory and loss. He worries about our tenuous grip on existence, how quickly life and our ideals can slip through our fingers. Through his constant references to art history along with the writings of authors like Marcel Proust, Vladimir Nabokav and Lewis Carrol, he attempts to preserve the past on his camera film. However, the contemporary world inhabits these staged pasts, with works suggesting both a past scene and a modern day event we can read about in the news. There is often a characteristic duality in his work; hovering between innocence and experience, passivity and aggression, masculinity and femininity

His work references and humours the evolution of Turkish Society, current affairs and media. For instance, "Suicide" shows how Turkish girls, in an attempt to be Western, have become consumers of fashion and what can happens when ideals are lost, a criticism against the girls in society on whom he has built his hopes upon.

In his "Readers" series, books and the library play an important role. The books function not only as symbols of knowledge but, more importantly, as tools for female self-empowerment.

Meanwhile, "Lamentations" (New World Series, 2006 - 2007), showing 11 girls sprawled across an oriental rug, was based on Abu Ghraib prison during the American invasion on Iraq where girls were shown piled up as did the Iraqi prisoners. This was the starting point but the work references various other ideas: Goya's Disasters of War and Theodore Gericault's painting "Raft of the Medusa".

The exhibition will also showcase 4 new works including a large triptych measuring 4m width and 2m in height.