Tuba Koymen
Tuba Koymen - Untitled 7 (from Inside/Outside series)
Tuba Oztekin Koymen (b. Turkey) received her BFA in Graphic Design from Bilkent University in Turkey, going on to earn her MFA in Photography and Digital Imaging from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 1999.
Major solo exhibitions include Center of Documentary Studies at Duke University, Light Factory in North Carolina, Fort Worth Community Art Center, Austin College in Sherman, Texas, and Museum Center in Baku, Azerbaijan. Her works have been in many group exhibitions in numerous national and international venues.
Koymen currently works as an adjunct professor of Photography at Texas Christian University.
Artist Statement
I consider myself to be an experimental photographer. My work revolves around geographical, cultural, and emotional issues, familiar territory for everyone regardless of race, gender, religion and national origin. My objective is to bring attention to human nature by setting up an imaginary or virtual window.
As an artist, I connect with my audience through photography and photo-based installations. I work primarily with pinhole cameras. With pinhole photography I am surprised every time I develop a new piece of film—it is like looking through a child’s eyes. Therefore, I am seduced by this medium. There is nothing fake about pinhole photography as it shows a surface of reality from another dimension. Pinhole photography allows me to encourage viewers to insert themselves into this realistic but at the same time fictional looking space. Pinhole by its very nature, with long exposures, creates an image that is not of a subject captured in an instant of time but the passing of time in a single image. The pinhole image is romantic and seductive.
My home country of Turkey has inspired much of my work. Each time I travel home, I visit somewhere a part of the country I have never been before. Each time I visited a new place, I make a new pinhole camera. I travel with this new camera, meet new faces and discover new places.
Major solo exhibitions include Center of Documentary Studies at Duke University, Light Factory in North Carolina, Fort Worth Community Art Center, Austin College in Sherman, Texas, and Museum Center in Baku, Azerbaijan. Her works have been in many group exhibitions in numerous national and international venues.
Koymen currently works as an adjunct professor of Photography at Texas Christian University.
Artist Statement
I consider myself to be an experimental photographer. My work revolves around geographical, cultural, and emotional issues, familiar territory for everyone regardless of race, gender, religion and national origin. My objective is to bring attention to human nature by setting up an imaginary or virtual window.
As an artist, I connect with my audience through photography and photo-based installations. I work primarily with pinhole cameras. With pinhole photography I am surprised every time I develop a new piece of film—it is like looking through a child’s eyes. Therefore, I am seduced by this medium. There is nothing fake about pinhole photography as it shows a surface of reality from another dimension. Pinhole photography allows me to encourage viewers to insert themselves into this realistic but at the same time fictional looking space. Pinhole by its very nature, with long exposures, creates an image that is not of a subject captured in an instant of time but the passing of time in a single image. The pinhole image is romantic and seductive.
My home country of Turkey has inspired much of my work. Each time I travel home, I visit somewhere a part of the country I have never been before. Each time I visited a new place, I make a new pinhole camera. I travel with this new camera, meet new faces and discover new places.
