Güler Ates was born in Muş, Eastern Turkey in 1977 and studied at the University of Marmara. Moving to London around 2001, after initial art studies at Wimbledon School of Art, she graduated from the Royal College of Art with an MA in Printmaking in 2008, then becoming a digital print tutor at the Royal Academy Schools, and a visiting tutor at a number of UK art institutions. Establishing an international exhibition career, her work which encompasses video, photography, printmaking, and performance, continues to explore contemporary experiences of identity, diaspora and cultural displacement.
Artist Güler Ates was born in Muş, Eastern Turkey in 1977, and immigrated to Britain in around 2001. She graduated from the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London in 2008 with an MA in Printmaking before being appointed a digital print tutor at the Royal Academy Schools. She has also held visiting lecturer posts at Sheffield Hallam University and the University of Hertfordshire, among other institutions.
Ates' multidisciplinary work encompasses video, photography, printmaking, and performance through which she explores contemporary experiences of identity, diaspora and cultural displacement. In her photographic series, the concept of the veil plays a pivotal role: using only natural light, she places fully veiled female figures in different contexts, including a 16th-century English university library, the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, and the City Palace Museum in Udaipur in India. These continually changing contexts represent and examine the definition of the exotic that merges Eastern and Western sensualities. The veil is a garment as much as a concept, a metaphor, a mystery, expressing what is invisible, silent or holy. It forms part of a poetic language revealing and concealing the body. In the artist's own words, 'The figures in these works inhabit the places in a ghostly manner. The allusion is both to invisibility and visibility' (Times of India). By working with Islamic motifs and patterns overlaid on the fabric worn by these veiled women, Ates combined elements from Middle Eastern exoticism from her own heritage with those representing Victorian propriety. She explained: ‘In my art, I deal with the journey that I took from Istanbul to London, exploring female identity and displacement, which also is autobiographical’ (Varsha Naik 2012).
Ates has exhibited frequently at the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, as well as in many solo exhibitions in the UK and internationally from 2010 onwards. Her work has been featured in numerous groups shows including New Contemporaries Archive Films, ICA (2010), 2Q13: Women Collectors, Women Artists, Lloyds Club, London (2013), Journey at the Jewish Museum, London (2015), Unexpected: Continuing Narratives of Identity and Migration, Ben Uri Gallery and Museum, London (2016) and Migrations: Masterworks from the Ben Uri Collection at Gloucester Museum (2019). Ates has also completed residencies in India (2012 and 2009), Rio de Janeiro (2013–2014), Istanbul (2014) and at Eton College, Berkshire (2015, which led to a solo exhibition in 2018), and the London District of the Methodist Church (2019). Güler Ates continues to live and work in London. Her work can be found in UK public collections including the Ben Uri Collection, the Government Art Collection, the Royal Academy of Art and the V&A, as well as in MAR in Rio de Janeiro, among others.
Güler Ates in the Ben Uri collection
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Güler Ates]