Artist Statament
Photography by Gülcan Barut
As an artist and activist, Tekiner dissects through the political knowledge coming out of various methods and means of manipulation, and examines the social perception zones as sediments on the society as a result of that produce. Through artistic gadgets Tekiner intervenes in the obscured and processed history of the land she lives upon, unlocking debates to question reality by the vernaculars of art.
 
Her work engages with the problematic of systemic manipulation targeting the daily life by the political and ideological hegemony. While the doctrinal language, shaping and aligning the society by penetrating the spaces of daily life such as tales, written history, textbooks, media, public aesthetics and industrial products, at the same time obliterates the public memory. Continuity and violence of such manufactured knowledge is set up and attained both in language and in visual aesthetics. Thus by employing the manipulative devices frequently used by the authority to align the public, she aims for an ironic deconstruction to remind and make visible of what it is forgotten. In short, her art mimics the hegemonic means of the authority that blurs the sharp line drawn between the real and the manipulated. Hence by exercising manipulation as a technique (selection, addition and subtraction) on the language that records social and political history, she puts an emphasis on the sheer vulgarity and destructiveness of manipulation itself.
 
Besides her artistic practice, Tekiner conducts interdisciplinary research on the genealogy of the manipulative discourse mentioned above. In her book published in 2010, through historical examination, Tekiner analyzed various political breaking points notably the coup periods to illustrate how Atatürk monuments regulate the public space and systematically codify the state as a dominant and omnipresent object of ideology. Focusing on the period spanning from the founding years of the Republic till today, she argued that Atatürk monuments have always been instrumentalized on an ideological basis. At the same time through an archive search, she demonstrated the transformation of monuments into ‘empty objects’ especially through Anti-Kemalist government practices that still insisted to erect Atatürk monuments as robust objects to identify the state and to regulate the public space. 
 
The archive search shows the correspondence of certain agenda setting practices considered to be in opposition; such as agenda confusion as in the effort of a conservative bureaucrat attesting that he is not an anti-Kemalist by publically inaugurating an Atatürk monument or, agenda emphasis as in the rampant demand for Atatürk monuments by the pro-Kemalist institutions during the February 28 period which both in the end show that the monuments are in fact objects of a mechanism to set the society in order.
 
Choosing to expend her artistic production in various disciplines and methods, this interdisciplinary approach enables Tekiner to inquire on the fabrication of ‘knowledge’ and ‘reality’ as processes in different levels while at the same time allows to study the system as a modus operandi and to question if this modus operandi is just simple or not.