Naz Tansel is studying drawing at Mimar Sinan Academy of Fine Arts. Her works have been exhibited at Mimar Sinan’s Tophane-i Amire Gallery, TÜYAP Art Fair and the Istanbul Hidirellez Spring Festival. In 2011, Tansel participated in a German-Turkish designers’ exchange programme. She spent six months at the University of Seville in Spain as an Erasmus exchange student in 2012. She was selected by Mimar Sinan University to attend the 55th Venice Biennial in a trip organised by Yıldız Holding. She is working for the first time with Studio Rodeo as part of the Reframe project.
Icky, Sticky, Tricky Treat is my first ever work with Studio Rodeo. Since I was not experienced in sequential art, my main concern was how to establish the feeling of continuity. This, when combined with the fact that I show my technique much better when working directly in colour, created the necessity to work on a story with more space for the visuals and less characters to build.
Derren Brown, who sort of featured in this short and ironic anecdote, was not a person I knew about. Murat Mıhçıoğlu provided me with some leads about how to picture him. I watched several of his shows online, and then I constructed my idea of what might be regarded as a perfectly typical British family visiting the Mediterranean shores of Turkey.
I never dug too much into the economic and political details of how Europe actually works as a system. However, especially in the past few years I did travel around Europe, most of the time as an Erasmus student, and my perception is totally positive. Even though I was a foreigner wherever I spent time, I never felt alienated or unsafe. The cities I have been to were welcoming and the people were gentle. I felt I had become part of the harmony in there, and I liked it. I do not know how much and in what way my ideas would differ had I been a resident and not just a visitor.
The work I contributed as an artist shows how some very tiny details in daily life may be misunderstood or misinterpreted because of cultural gaps. I think this is one main issue between Turkey and the EU.
