Patrik Proško

The anamorphic portrait of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938), the first president of the Republic of Turkey, draws on his role in shaping the modern Turkish Republic and on the values associated with its profound social transformation. Central to this are the separation of religion from politics and the secularisation of the legal system, the equal legal status of women, and the effort to build a modern secular state governed by law and inspired by European social and legal models. This transformation also included educational reform and the replacement of the Arabic script with the Latin alphabet, which contributed significantly to increased literacy. These historical changes are not treated in the installation as illustrations of individual events, but as a framework for the choice of materials and the setting of the portrait. The work is made exclusively from historical Turkish objects connected with Atatürk’s life, his era and the emergence of the modern Republic of Turkey. The installation is conceived as a view into a presidential study. A writing desk, bookcase, armchair, maps, documents, personal objects and state symbols together create not only the resulting likeness, but also a spatial image of a period in which the form of the Turkish state and society was being transformed.