Fugitive Bodies

Hüseyin Özinal

I first began to feel the gripes of change in my work together with the opening of the borders in 2003 and my return to Cyprus in 2004.

Having experienced the war as a 13-year-old boy in a village in the south of Cyprus in 1974, being forced to migrate to the north with the population exchange in 1975, and as someone who has witnessed the division of Cyprus, I still bear the pain and anger of all these traumas despite my efforts to leave them behind me. This anger and pain that I feel occasionally comes across and finds its way into in my work.

The establishment of the Initiative Against Homophobia movement in 2006, and my role in it as one of the founders, and my involvement in other subsequent activist movements created a natural process that followed one another.

At that time, I found myself in the gay rights movement as a person who was weighted by the anger I felt against the division of Cyprus as well as aware of the discriminatory atmosphere set by criminal law which defined homosexuality as “relations against nature”; relations defined as an offence punishable by incarceration.

Deep down (having grown up and lived in a homophobic society), it was an extraordinary situation to return to a Cyprus whose borders were opened, after having lived almost 30 years in a diaspora, unable to express one’s self and live freely.

Working as an independent activist between 2014 and 2017 in the Gender Equality Platform created by the feminist movement in the north of Cyprus was very important to my personal life. In particular, it was an important element to see which aspects LGBTQ and feminist movements joined or separated from one another. I should also write that my feminist friends, both in this platform and outside life, have contributed greatly to my recent work. Their shared knowledge and personal experiences helped nourish my painting from different fields.

In my most recent series Fugitive Bodies (2016-2018) my work on the body is a point I have reached as a culmination of these processes.

The first home of humans, where they exist and where they can be themselves, is their own bodies. From the very first moment that I was aware of my existence and my own cognizance, I began to fight “to be myself”. The Cyprus where the first years of my life and youth took place, and after the borders had been opened (even though at the time of writing they are closed due to the Covid-19 epidemic), as well as Istanbul, where I lived for 30 years in between,  have always been a field of struggle and existence for me.

All that exists within what is disregarded, the suppressed, the abused, the eliminated, the others that are unseen, intentionally overlooked by heteronormativity and at the same time forced to feel the necessity to adhere to normativity: to have ideal bodies. We are struggling against a heterosexist world, and these are the issues I am concerned with in my work.

I can only continue my existence by making and by working. Even though the issues I have been working on lately are heavy from time to time, even though I feel that I am hurting and suffering, it is good for me to push the boundaries of my art while pushing my own boundaries, and to produce in a political space that carries universal values.

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Hüseyin Özinal
Born in 1961, in Binatlı/Limassol, Cyprus and migrated to Güzelyurt/ Morphou after the 1974 war. Between the years 1979-1984 he completed his artistic training in Painting at Marmara University, and lived in Istanbul until 2004, permanently relocating back to Cyprus the same year. Özinal’s interest in the body in painting, the states and policies of the body run parallel to his role as activist in the LGBTI community. Since 2016, his work focuses on issues such as the incompleteness of the body – unwillingness to find form and above all, resistance to becoming ideal bodies. This resistance is expresed in minimalist and subtle forms, akin to poetry. For more information: http://huseyinozinal.com/ contact: enkidu61@yahoo.com