The Dispossessed by Cansu Yıldıran

A woman stands resolutely on an empty rural road, certainty in her stance. In another image, her wispy red hair, dry like dead foliage, blows in the wind. Isolated bodies, paralysed by work or boredom, are scattered adrift across an uneven valley. Another woman sits with her, head bowed in a dimly lit kitchen – a strangely ominous figure. These images are from Çaykara, situated below the Kuşmer Highland in Turkey’s Black Sea region, where the photographer Cansu Yıldıran was born in 1996 and has spent the last decade photographing. The photographs transpire an uncanny feeling of dread, as though something terrible is about to happen – or is already happening, if we could only grasp what it is.

The images are “evocative of the atmosphere of folk horror films, the sub-genre most suiting our time and age,” according to Begüm Özden Fırat and Ayça Yüksel, who wrote the accompanying text for Yıldıran’s series, The Dispossessed (2024). Monsters are the traditional protagonists of horror, but horror plots are often constructed to emphasise the mystery of the nature of the monster itself. Monsters, and the attendant uncanniness they evoke, haunt the margins of what can be legitimately thought and said. They hold the possibility (and the fear) of something different.

Cansu Yıldıran has been tracing the possibilities and fears wrought by the last decades of political turmoil in Turkey since they were a teenager. But their work is not just an archive of upheaval – it is also an examination of their undersides. Their style of documentation makes inquiries about the effects of political authoritarianism – not just in a crude sense, but asking how they make us think, how they make us feel. Their images from various Pride gatherings, which have been prohibited by the government since 2014, are a visual capture of uproar. Bare breasts dance atop cars, forcing a collective libidinal release on the street. Other scenes show middle-aged women joining protests at Cerattepe, where thousands marched against planned mining activities in 2015. One of Yıldıran’s most famous images was taken at a Women's Day Protest in Istanbul in 2021. It catches Rukan and Hejar, two Kurdish and queer activists, sharing a kiss before a wintery Kadiköy harbour. After the protest they were arrested, subjected to house arrest and banned from leaving the country. The weight of this image comes in its tilting frame. It’s as if the whole world is skewed except these two figures – the only elements who are upright and standing. Yıldıran catches both their intimacy and the harsh conditions against which it battles. They are not the ones who are crooked – the city is.

I first came across Yıldıran’s work many years ago through Özlem, my ex-flatmate in Istanbul, where I’ve lived for a large part of the last decade. Özlem was an active part of the queer community in the city, the subject of Yıldıran’s earlier autoethnographic work, and my life has been informed by her stubborn insistence on living through the pain and paralysis of political repression. Yıldıran’s photographs capture this insistence. They contain a pent-up scream. In their images, it is the subject of politics itself which is in question, how this crackles and vibrates. Streets are policed and bruised. Bodies are woozy and taut. Yıldıran’s instinct is to be with a person in their sorrow – or their euphoria, or wildness or alienation. Their gaze catches the uncanniness and shadows haunting Istanbul and the wider country. 

Locating the Uncanny in The Dispossessed

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The Dispossessed, which documents life in Çaykara, pushes the question of where, exactly, this uncanniness lies. Here, women are prohibited from owning either house or land – a right that belongs solely to men, owing to a set of overlapping historical property practices. The homes in this village are deeded to 373 households residing in another village, kilometres away, and the “common owners” of the highland are formed of a community of males. Perhaps the uncanny is a reference to this act of denial. But Yıldıran, who is against any form of ownership, is more concerned with probing what kinds of community emerge in the wake of this dispossession. Sometimes this is only evident in the suggestion, or the trace, of something else. 

I want to consider here how these traces recast questions of dispossession by bringing the home, as opposed to property, to the centre of focus. Uncanniness is central to this recasting – between possession and dispossession; between the homespace as a site of oppression and that of liberation; between what is seen and understood as legitimate. Yıldıran’s images work these tensions, asking us to think more closely about the intimacies at the centre of ownership struggles, and the hauntings which accompany them. 

The residents of Çaykara are at once located in a particular geography, whilst being unfixed in time, and out of place. This is literally the case: Çaykara was the home of the Pontic Greek speaking community in the first half of the 20th century, before resettlement and government intervention led to the decline of this spoken language. In the 1960s, all the villages in the region were officially renamed. It is also figuratively the case in the insistent displacements which mark a woman’s life here – forced to practice her own life project in the cracks between different structures of estrangement, the state, the market, the law, the patriarch. In their statement introducing The Dispossessed series, Yıldıran described how “as the daughter of a woman who did not have a room of her own in the village that my roots went back to … I realised that what I was running away from was a point of belonging and not belonging, a light, a ‘thing’.” Perhaps it is in this “thing”, unbounded and undefined but resolutely present, that the uncanniness lurks. 

The Home as Becoming

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Unease emerges in part from the ambiguity of what is being captured in the images. There is blunt physical violence – a road sign riddled with bullets, a dead bird hanging suspended, news footage of military violence on a television screen framed by animal skulls. But it is the creep of social violence which Yıldıran’s tilted lens most powerfully captures. The sight of two women walking along a dirt road at night, caught in Yıldıran’s lurid flash, feels troubling, despite their easy gait. Expressions of other women are fixed as grimaces or exclamations, sometimes as calm serenity. One woman, Yıldıran’s aunt, clasps a rifle with a smile of almost manic happiness. The silhouette of a covered (or hooded) figure points their finger into the darkening air, as if in warning or explanation. The entrails of life – human hair or animal clippings – merge on the grass, flattened by Yıldıran’s overexposed lens. Here lies the very naked fact of being. It rejects one of the hallmarks of patriarchy, which demands perfection – a falsity simply to be admired. 

“The home,” Mai Taha writes, “is always becoming, constantly remade with every demolition and every displacement” (2025:2). Writing in the context of Palestine, she positions the home as a site of “insurgent social reproduction” – “both a crime scene and a revolutionary space; a site of colonial surveillance and destruction, and a grounding site of labour and reconstruction” (ibid). The home encompasses these contradictions as an acute infrastructure of both relations and practices – where production, reproduction, consumption and care emerge in multiple intertwined forms. Taha situates their tensions by paying attention to the minor details of the mundane homespace. 

One could also imagine the minor as a space of freedom and possibility, where “things can be known and seen differently” (Silmi, 2023:73). To “know and see things differently” here is to rearticulate the home within history and politics. (Taha, 2025: 6)

Writing about the Palestinian revolution of 1936–9 against the British Mandate, Taha reconfigures the relationship between the revolution and the kitchen, the bedroom and the living room – positioning the home itself as the site where the revolution is made possible, and “the space from which we can rethink historical difference dialectically” (2025:16). For Yıldıran, these questions of reconfiguration arise over the practices of communal belonging, and the relationships which emerge, both within and beyond the homespace and forms of property ownership itself. Questions of ownership, in Çaykara, are tied to the ethnonationalist project of policing the ownership structures of the non-Muslim populations in the country, as well as patriarchal modes of governance. The female subjects of The Dispossessed are situated at the juncture of overlapping violences.

The Ghosts which Haunt the Edges

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The images of The Dispossessed are acutely material. The property which the women are prohibited from owning is tangible in the splintering wood ceiling and peeling wallpaper. There is the intimate domesticity of kitchenware, fantasmic habitats of ironic-eyed animals, tender religious habits. A praying woman’s flower-patterned body is lost among similar patterned fabrics outside her home, as though she’s being swallowed by the house she can never own. But time functions differently here. Ghosts from the past, in the form of faded black and white photographs, haunt the present (if we are, indeed, in the present – there are no clear temporal markers to ground us). Phantoms lurk in the undisclosed space. Yıldıran’s women, including their aunt and mother, tease their spectral confines – both of patriarchal structures and attempted representation. Their bodies are bent, their shapes sometimes mirroring the animals grazing the land. They are collapsed together in laughter. They are tending fires and fields, knotted and twisted. A trio of gnarled feet rest on a blanket, almost deformed.

Overexposed, underexposed, double-exposed. There are pictures in this collection which might otherwise be discarded, out of focus and blurred as they are. It is as though different artists have approached the subject matter with their own style of documentation, each one situating, interrogating, and representing the particular socio-political world they see in the “humble, familiar, everyday objects” (Lefebvre, 2014:132). What emerges is sometimes hallucinatory – the disorientation of different frames and angles, which occasionally overlap but often don’t. More often, it is luminous. They give the impression of trying to hold together conflicting tendencies. We are confronted not only with life in the daylight hours, but the jagged shadows which haunt its edges, dodging capture. The monstrous is not a matter of fear, but of play – playing with what is seen and understood as legitimate.  

In his set of essays on The Weird and the Eerie, Mark Fisher probes this tension between what is seen and understood as legitimate, describing how “the eerie” entails a disengagement from our current attachments.

The perspective of the eerie can give us access to the forces which govern mundane reality but which are ordinarily obscured, just as it can give us access to spaces beyond mundane reality altogether. It is this release from the mundane, this escape from the confines of what is ordinarily taken for reality, which goes some way to account for the peculiar appeal that the eerie possesses. (Fisher, 2016:13)

For Fisher, the eerie, weird, uncanny, and strange relate to that which lies beyond “standard” perceptions and cognitions. He traces the close connections between the English word “haunt” and the German word “unheimlich” to expose the double valence of both. The familiar, or “homely,” becomes the uncanny, or “unhomely,” in which “‘haunt’ signals both the dwelling-place, the domestic scene and that which invades or disturbs it” (2014:125). In this sense, the familiar and the disturbing are tightly imbricated, each providing the condition of possibility for the other – the familiar is strange and the strange is familiar. This, Gary Wilder suggests, “illuminates how what may appear to be other subjects, separate places and different times are already integral elements of a group, a territory, an era” (2022:25). It is the dialectic between them, the known and the different, which is important. 

Politics and the Carnivalesque in Istanbul

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Yıldıran’s wider portfolio is an ongoing chronicle of what aspects of society are dodging capture in today’s Turkey, where marginal histories and spaces struggle to be heard. Their oeuvre is awash in threat, seduction, and eeriness. Sensuality abounds (Yıldıran’s Instagram account1 was temporarily closed in 2022 owing to nudity in their photographs). Plundering dispossessions are being enacted against every strata of society in the country, but the forms they take are not always obvious. The queer community in particular has been subject to ongoing, and intensifying political attacks. Last month a draft of the government’s proposed law reform was leaked to the media, which proposes to criminalise LGBTI+ individuals within the scope of “indecent acts” which are deemed “contrary to biological sex and general morality” (Human Rights Watch, 2025). Yıldıran’s lens catches a repository of desire, pain and defiance – a spectrum so muddled it sometimes confuses longing with fear.

Looking at the images fills the mind with noise, even in the still of a silent room. We see carnival-esque protests, haunted by motion blur; civilian firemen fighting the Muğla forest fires framed by their looping hoses; the desolate rubble of homes destroyed in the 2023 earthquake; the joyous swell of Pride gatherings, with energy so tangible it screams out loud. The kitsch and surreal exist alongside the alienated and forlorn, a tangle of mimicries, apparitions, and displacements. There is no single centre, only an excess of movement. Sometimes moments of almost unbearable tenderness emerge amid the bodies and turmoil, fragile – a broken hug, a stolen kiss. “Tenderness,” wrote Roland Barthes, is a “miraculous crystallisation of presence… Where you are tender, you speak your plural” (1978:225).

This is a poetics and ethics at once. We are confronted with this disorienting topography without explanation or expectation – or pity. It feels as though we are balanced on a permanent edge of rupture, never quite materialised but forever haunting the periphery. The carnivalesque elements create a measure of distance between people’s own inner lives and the lives they’re expecting to inhabit within the symbolic and actual hierarchies of the city. In carnivals held in early modern England, temporary misrule, role reversals, and disguises were recurring practices, where wearing masks, cross-dressing, and hybrid costumes were common. Similarly, in Yıldıran’s gaze, we see masks, disturbances, mockeries in which policing and urban paraphernalia are active participants, and violence leaves its trace in both visible and haunted ways. Mikhail Bakhtin’s famous study of the carnivalesque describes the political potential of this role reversal –

The feast was a temporary suspension of the entire official system with all its prohibitions and hierarchic barriers. For a short time life came out of its usual, legalised and consecrated furrows and entered the sphere of utopian freedom. The very brevity of this freedom increased its fantastic nature and utopian radicalism, born in the festive atmosphere of images (1984:89).

To be Dispossessed

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Yıldıran’s images are not a pure documentation of “utopian freedom,” shot through as they are with forms of domination – of nationalism, patriarchy, alienation and the state. Rather they allow us to unthink self-evident boundaries – between violence and resistance, freedom and alienation, now and then, us and them. The uncanny emerges again in the entanglement between the strange and familiar. The images ask the question of what, exactly, is being dispossessed – and what is being possessed. Perhaps, like tenderness, this requires appreciating that which excludes absolute possession. Athena Athanasiou and Judith Butler probe this paradox in their interrogation of the double valence of dispossession. 

Firstly we must elaborate on how to think about dispossession outside of the logic of possession, calling into question the exclusionary calculus of proprietariness in late liberal forms of power; and secondly, we must elaborate why this reflective gesture is politically significant. (2013:13)

To be “dispossessed,” as they remind us, can also provoke our sense of self – not as bounded individuals but as social and interdependent beings – in ways that can be transformative:

We are dispossessed of ourselves by virtue of being moved and even surprised or disconcerted by an encounter with alterity … this reveals one basis of relationality – we are ourselves moved by what is outside us, by others, but also by whatever “outside” resides in us (2013:11-12)

Yıldıran works this tension. Their images, a spectrum of tangled emotions, ask what it means to be dispossessed of oneself by the displacements produced by grief, love, rage, fear – and how these connect us (in not always clear ways) with others. We see this evident even in those images which seem, at first glance, to capture urban alienation. Political traces of other human lives leave an insistent mark – the flag of a protest march, the graffiti on the wall, the tattered flyers of concert listings, the woman sitting next to an empty chair. They contain memories of other human actions, from another time, still making themselves felt today. They suggest a cityscape inescapably bound to its own margins – not a monolith but a terrain.

Property and Possession

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If The Dispossessed takes the denial of property and land ownership in Çaykara as its starting point, Yıldıran invites us to also consider dispossession more widely as the enforced deprivation of rights, livelihood, desire or modes of belonging produced by encroachments of capitalism and patriarchy. Such forms of dispossession attack the myriad of entangled practices through which life is lived – stripping life of its sheer vitality, and weirdness, itself. The opposite of dispossession is not, they suggest, possession – certainly not individual possessiveness. It emerges in the bent, twisted, and grotesque, the collective moments of gathering, the quiet solitude and contemplation, the communion with nature, the fragile persistence of there being something else haunting the present. This vitality is stubborn, unpredictable – often uncanny, unnerving and difficult to grasp. In an uncanny world, facts are shot through with their possible shadows, of effaced histories and disavowed identities. Transversal alignments may be forged across seemingly self-evident differences. The familiar and the strange coexist.

Yıldıran’s subjects are imbued with a power of their own – sometimes playing with shadows, but brought irreversibly into being, under their (flash)light. The uncanny might refer to something which ought to have been hidden, but which has been brought to light. As Italo Calvino points out, lightness does not mean being detached from reality but of cleansing it from its gravity – looking at it obliquely, but no less profoundly (1988). Yıldıran’s work therefore reveals the potential which Aimé Césaire had in mind when he wrote, “the image is forever surpassing that which is perceived, because the dialectic of the image transcends the antinomies” (1990:iii).

• 1. https://www.instagram.com/cansuyildirannn/?hl=en