İlker Ortaç is an Istanbul-based writer, illustrator and visual artist
living with cerebral palsy. In this personal story, he talks about his latest art project, which explores disability, bodily difference, visibility, beauty norms and social exclusion.
My relationship with disability has shaped not only the way I move
through the world, but also the way I look, draw and think.
For a long time, disabled bodies were presented to me through other
people’s descriptions. They were explained through medicine, pity,
limitation or inspiration. Disabled people were often expected to
remain quiet, grateful and invisible. Art became one of the ways I
could challenge that expectation.
Read: Healing Through Art With A Physical Disability: How Pain Became Purpose
Challenging beauty standards through disability art and representation
I began drawing as a way of observing people and spending time with
them. When I draw someone, I do not simply reproduce their appearance.
I stay with their face, their gestures, their contradictions and their
presence. Even when I draw people I do not like, I spend time with
them. A drawing becomes a moment of contact, a fragment of memory and
sometimes a form of confrontation.
My work often focuses on faces and bodies that do not fit easily into
familiar ideas of beauty. I am interested in wrinkles, asymmetry,
scars, exaggerated expressions, awkward gestures and bodies that
resist being made comfortable for the viewer. These qualities are not
mistakes to be corrected. They are part of how people exist in the
world.
Popular culture has traditionally built its visual language around
beauty, youth, health and physical ability. Fashion images,
advertisements and commercial cinema often present the body as
something that must be controlled and improved. Disabled bodies are
usually excluded from this visual order, or they are included only
when they can be turned into a story of overcoming.
I want to move in another direction. I am not interested in presenting
disability as a tragedy or as a motivational lesson. I am interested
in the complicated, ordinary and political reality of living in a body
that society constantly tries to define. Disability is not only a
personal experience. It is also shaped by architecture, language,
public space, work, media and the expectations imposed on bodies.
Read: Ailís Ní Ríain: Deaf Composer, Visionary Artist And Advocate For Change
LIMIT: bodies against the norm
This perspective led me to develop LIMIT, an ongoing visual art
project about bodies, visibility, beauty norms, restriction and social
representation. LIMIT asks who is allowed to appear, who is made
invisible and who has the power to decide what a body should look
like.
The project includes digital portraits and drawings that sometimes
appear grotesque, humorous or deliberately uncomfortable. Humour is
important to me because reality can become so absurd that it is
impossible not to laugh. Some situations are funny because they expose
the violence of the rules we are expected to accept. Laughter can
interrupt the seriousness of authority and create another way of
looking.
LIMIT also examines the relationship between the body and limitation.
A boundary can be physical, social, architectural or psychological. It
can be a narrow doorway, an inaccessible institution, a medical
category, an aesthetic rule or a sentence that tells someone what they
can never become. The project asks whether these boundaries are
natural or whether they have been produced by society.
Disabled artist in Istanbul: challenging barriers through art
Living and working in Istanbul has made these questions especially
visible. The city can be energetic, creative and inspiring, but it can
also be difficult to move through as a disabled person. Streets,
buildings and institutions often carry an assumption about which
bodies will use them. When the city fails to accommodate a body, the
problem is not the body itself. The problem is the environment and the
social order around it.
My art practice is a way of refusing that order. I draw bodies not to
make them acceptable, but to allow them to remain complex. I want the
viewer to encounter a face without immediately placing it into a
category of beauty, weakness, strength or failure.
For me, being a disabled artist is not a separate identity that exists
outside my practice. It is part of the way I experience time, space,
attention and contact. It affects how I work, but it does not
determine the limits of what I can imagine.
Through drawing, I try to create images that do not ask for
permission. They do not apologise for being strange, vulnerable, angry
or excessive. They simply remain visible.
To find out more about İlker Ortaç and view his drawings, visit his LIMIT art project and follow him on Instagram.