Promise No Promises!

Inhabiting a Tongue Together is the twenty-second episode of The Tale and the Tongue podcast series. It is a conversation with artist Iz Öztat, driven by the curiosity to learn more about Iz and Zişan, Iz’s close collaborator and her alter ego, a ghost she encounters from time to time.

As I got to know Zişan better, a sense of time travel came over me. Every episode of her life is a place of struggle, yet also confidence and desire. To follow Zişan brings you to places and times that we have not lived: the Ottoman Empire, the European avant-garde, the memory of the waters of the Danube, the love between women writers in the 1920s... Thanks to Iz Öztat, Zişan makes the past happen differently. The present is a slippery time. It can move us backward and forwards at the same time. The spirit of the Avant-garde of the last century, promoting European modernity, is not so far removed from our present. The relevance of artistic practices is still decided from the same places, even if their actors come from different locations. And it is here that Zişan appears to challenge and be part of an avant-garde that made Europe the centre of attention. When asking Iz for a different way to introduce Zişan, she would go back to the title of this series. They tell a story inhabiting a tongue together. But this tongue speaks different languages.