Everyone Knows Their Place
- Aug 25
- 4 min read
“In this family, roles imitate one another.” Doğu Özgün’s The Dynasty of Trueheart asks whether love can change the roles we are given within a family.
A chess piece cannot decide how it moves. In Doğu Özgün’s The Dynasty of Trueheart, the first painting in his Dynasty series, a porcelain family stands on a chessboard. Its Turkish title, Özocak Hanedanlığı, evokes home and belonging, while its English title suggests sincerity and goodness. Both names make generous promises about a family whose moves have already been decided.
Is this family playing its own game or carrying out the roles it has been given?
The word “family” may evoke love, strong bonds and cooperation, but it can also suggest an organised, strategic structure. This small group has internalised every rule of a male-dominated society. It has bonds of love and strong roots that could allow it to leave patriarchy behind, yet it continues to reproduce it. For me, family is a cocoon where people hide when they lack the courage to step outside the patriarchal system. Like any creature in hiding, it has a passive-aggressive edge. We sometimes hear that “the woman is the one who calls the shots” in a family. What I am trying to get at is not “womanhood” or “manhood,” but what those roles serve.
No one in the families in my Dynasty series makes decisions of their own. They are merely extras in the rituals of the class they belong to, so they have no will of their own. In this family, roles imitate one another, and each comes with its own boundaries and responsibilities.
The work is titled Özocak Hanedanlığı in Turkish and The Dynasty of Trueheart in English. “Ocak” evokes home and belonging, while “true heart” suggests sincerity and goodness. What promise does each title make for the same dynasty?
The names in the series are all inspired by the Turkish tradition of surnames that make exaggerated claims to purity and noble lineage. Öz, Hakiki, Has… Just as we can never live up to the superior qualities claimed by our surnames, the promise of endless honesty and loyalty among family members is not realistic either.
Is it right to read the faceless figure at the centre of the work as a mother?
I actually love painting portraits. I like drawing the faces of people I love from memory, and I draw the person I am speaking to while we are on the phone. But the paintings I exhibit are a different kind of practice for me. They are more than paintings: they deal with certain principles that go beyond individual people, species, genders, races, names and events. For that reason, I try to anonymise faces, signs, symbols and other features that might point too directly to a particular person. In this painting, for example, the figure at the centre is not an image of a mother, but of “motherhood.”
Porcelain is fragile and valuable, as well as a symbol of status. What does it add to the way power is shown in the work?
Family is closely tied to the home, property, land and domestic life. Particularly in Eastern cultures, it is also one of the safest places to shelter from society’s judgement. The security of belonging to a family comes with certain privileges. They can make us blind to someone else’s pain, but they also come with the threat of being excluded from the family. Porcelain represents this privileged fragility.
Family is where we first learn trust. It can also be where we learn obedience and hierarchy. Does power become harder to recognise when it speaks the language of love and protection?
What good does recognising love do us? Love is a very sweet thing, but acquiring the tools we need to become free cannot be separated from love. If love is not tied to responsibility and effort, and does not help a child acquire those tools, then I think it becomes an emotional burden.
In your 2023 exhibition Fake Mustache, you portrayed society as a child imitating adulthood and power. This time, we are looking at a family. Did following power through society eventually lead you home?
To put it plainly, I see the toxic traits associated with masculinity as something accepted and practised by everyone in society. That led me beyond the home, to every place and moment where patriarchy is put into practice by everyone, without fail...
A backgammon piece, a bicycle, an ornament... Why do you entrust big issues to small, everyday things?
This is a very good question; it already contains answers and interpretations of its own. Heroism, grandeur, uniqueness, monumentality... None of these ideas have a place in my aesthetic. If we imagine the world for a moment as a library filled over centuries with ideas and art, there is not much empty space left on its shelves for our own ideas and art. I keep going in the hope that I might squeeze in between them. I am trying to fit into a minor gap. I find today’s drive to make work grand and overly ambitious naive and ridiculous.
When a chess piece leaves the board, it loses its identity within the game. What does a person lose or gain when they step outside the role assigned to them within their family?
What we lose outside the game is not identity, but our roles. Once outside, identity becomes only a tool. What we do with that identity is what we call life. I think it's worth trying.
Opening image: Doğu Özgün, Özocak Hanedanlığı / The Dynasty of Trueheart, 2026. Oil on paper, 71 x 71 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Ferda Art Platform.