All My Beds Installation
Bed sculpture, digital prints, wood, framed photograph
26 × 109 × 199,5 cm
2025
Atakan has photographed every bed she has slept in since 1994. Selections from this collection have been exhibited in different formats over time, but for All the beds I slept in (2025) sixty chosen images were pieced together within a wooden framework using the dimensions of a single bed. As a marker of how it all began, a framed photograph of the four-or five-year-old artist sleeping beside her friend Rebecca sits on top of the sculpture. Beds from different cultures carry cultural meaning and reflect changing life styles. For example, in Turkey traditional cotton or silk quilts and buttoned linen sheets with lace embellishment have been replaced by duvet covers and fabricated synthetic quilts. Beds, private feminine places, witness scenes of joy, pain, pleasure, eroticism, sickness, passion, infidelity, innocence, birth and death. For the artist, the obsessive recording of beds serves as a diary, makes private moments public, exposes fragments of life, symbolizes today’s mobile life style, and brings the everyday into the art arena.
Rehearsal
3 silkscreen images taken from a 1957 USA
Television program “Father Knows Best”
50 x 70 cm
2013
A selection of images taken from Atakan’s collection of photographs of beds she slept in since 1994 have been arranged in a wooden bed-like structure. A small framed photograph of the 4-year-old artist and a friend sits on top. Behind this sculpture, on a transparent cloth triptych panel hang three silk screen prints taken from the 1950s television series, “Father Knows Best”. Standing in front of a mirror a teenage girl shares secret feelings: “My life is awful; “You are ugly, fat, and stupid, no one loves you”; “Everyone has a boyfriend while you are all alone”.
