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   I was botn the 27th of February in 1954 in Hirit, a little village hidden away in the mountains of eastern Turkey. My mother langue is Kurdish. In Hirit, when I was only 6 months old, an unhappy event made us leave and changed the course of my entire life.

   I never saw an automobile until I was seven, and in my village,where there was no school, no pencils or paper, and where all were illiteate, I began to draw pictures at the same time that I began towalk. With charcoal and whatever I could find.
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   My philosophy:

   Ever since Man invented the first tools millenia ago, he has never ceased to develop the technology of his predecessors.

   Modern domestic appliances and innumerable work tools invade our daily lives-- the television that we watch, the telephone that transports our voice over thousands of kilometers, the electricity that transforms night into day; sometimes dental prostheses, subcutaneous batteries, a stranger's eye set into our ocular cavity so that we can see. Automobiles, ships, airplanes, instruments of war, spaceships, interplanetary travel, bombs of all sorts; atomic, nuclear, and biological weapons. Skyscrapers, computers, industrial and military research centers, robots... Not to mention the tens of thousands of factories necessary for production of all this, and to manage it, millions of human brains in perpetual activity.

   For me, it is time to take ahold of this subject, to formulate a new reference-- that of a parallel life, a "nature" made by Man piece by piece, which is called "technology." It is not really alive, yet it is continual and irreversible.

   Behind my portraits, I have tried to hide tons of information and encrypt life in its multiple facets. "Man-Technology-Nature" in one concept, without lines of demarcation, as though giving birth to a biomechanical being. In my opinion, our inventions have become our sixth sense, our third hands and feet, our wings, our eyes, our brains for specific chores. By now we have become inseparable.

   Since its conception, I have had to change my vision over 20 times, as I wanted to create an original face : a man incorporating all our feelings of insecurity, joy, and fears, that would symbolize our advanced technology. But also all the inevitable consequences connected with this modernization, sometimes too exaggerated and often with negative effects on the fragile equilibrium of precious Nature. He has everybody around him but no one with him. He has every reason for being afraid, because it is he who see all, hears all, knows all. With all the weight of his epoch on his shoulders, he is a man-machine that breathes, and that remains above all a man.

   The stakes become greater and greater. But the greatest among them unite to become "giants." Man as an individual see himself reduced to a "logo" or an "icon," one among 6 billion that already exist. "Little individual" or "little state" doesn't count any more today, or at least less and less. But every person in his "individual property" possesses particularities and riches different from those of others...

                                                                                                                                     Nezir KORKMAZ