‘LIMIT’ art project explores social controls imposed on bodies

İstanbul-based writer, illustrator and visual artist İlker Ortaç has turned his LIMIT project into an online exhibition that, according to the project’s website, examines how social norms and authoritarian ideas of normality regulate bodies.

The project addresses gender, desire, disability, shame, exposure and difference. The series "uses distortion, costume, make-up, masks and discomfort to highlight what it describes as violence embedded in respectability, discipline and classification," according to the artist.

The online exhibition places visitors inside a virtual auto repair shop. Amid the sounds of metal shutters, machinery and punk music, they encounter bodies that do not conform to established norms.

“The repair shop becomes a space that reverses the expectation that bodies should be fixed,” Ortaç said. “Using a grotesque language, I make visible bodies that resist being corrected and insist on their own existence. The aim is for viewers to question their own gaze.”

LIMIT is presented as a project for international editorial, curatorial and human rights contexts, with themes including anti-fascism, anti-discrimination, bodily autonomy, representation and resistance.

Ortaç spent formative years in eastern Turkey before settling in İstanbul. He studied librarianship and later pursued graduate-level sociology. He has published books, stories, zines and essays in Turkish, with work addressing disability, social exclusion, war, desire, domination, urban violence and everyday forms of power.

The exhibition can be viewed at https://limitartproject.com.

(VK)