In the ongoing body of work titled Every name in history is I and I is other, İz Öztat fabricates the (auto)biography of Zişan (1894-1970), who appears to her as a historical figure, a ghost, and an alter ego. She takes on Zişan’s archives and interprets them through her practice to propose a complex temporality where a suppressed past haunts an increasingly authoritarian present.

The chapter titled Boo Boo feeds off the research process that seeks to imagine the love affair between Zişan and Vita (Sackville-West), who meet in Istanbul, in 1913. While Zişan works at the photography studio of her father Dikran Bey, Vita comes in to have her photograph taken. They fall in love at first sight. During the one-year period when Vita lives in Istanbul, they spend time in the photography studio, imagining each other in the representations they produce, getting to know each other’s desires and documenting their love. 

In constructing this story through an improvisational process, Iz and Ra, whose assigned genders are female, construct their own selves in relation to each other in the experience of love, which they build as a field of research. At the center of the site-specific installation is this photography studio in which Zişan and Vita met and spent time. The construction of the space is informed by the orientalist elements that would have been found at a photography studio at the beginning of the 20th century and the prevailing orientalist aesthetic of the contemporary era, myths about the artist's studio, and fantasies that are inherent to the experience of love that enkindle desire. İz and Ra’s research process, in which they are themselves as well as Zişan and Vita, become visible through moments in the studio that is tranformed into a stage.

The body of work titled Boo Boo is initiated with a site-specific installation at Saha Studio and will be completed in the future with a video and publication