“My Breath Becomes a Crimson Horse”: Interviews with Nevhiz Tanyeli

Abstract

This extract from two interviews that took place in 2021 and 2023 with Nevhiz Tanyeli at her home in Şişli, İstanbul centers on a dialogue over her paintings, the possible interpretations of which the interviewers had discussed beforehand, informed by Bülent Küçük’s research on remembrances of Turkey during the events of 1968. Tanyeli offered both tea and counterinterpretations in her unique and witty style, with the interviewers both taken aback and learning something new. Her stories’ poetic sensibilities weave the violent historicity of witnessed events with personal memories of the living and the dead. Her paintings constitute a diary that combines the personal with the political, the dreamlike with the factual, and the associative with the nightmarish and repetitive real of the past. Her paintings, while they belong to certain dates, characters, and places, thus remain open for others’ imaginations to interpret. As a living participant and witness of ’68, her creative will yet speaks to us.