Türkkan zooms into the identity roles of the sports people in this area. Her subjects can be categorized in three demographic groups: Children, youth and adults. On a broader perspective, the artist looks into the situations where one puts up a tough exterior to masque his vulnerability and  inner fears, confronting themselves as well as others through the process loaded with pain. She also displays the background of the martials arts that has conflictings concepts as competition and solidarty, weakness and struggle co-exist at the same time.  She positions herself as the “outsider inside” as an observer, because she is also involved in martial arts herself by facing her own experience as well as studying others.  In martial arts, one can assess where the attack might come from while suffering the pain consciously as opposed to the natural couse of life, therefore the life pictured in these photographs can be called as the “contolled simulation of life”. 

Gözde Türkkan (alias Mimiko), born in 1984, focuses on gender politics, identities and roles through a subjective documentary approach in her photography. She studied elementary and high school at Lycée Français Pierre Loti in İstanbul and got interested in photography during the year 2000. After a year of study on physical science at Pierre et Marie Curie University in Paris, she was admitted to Istanbul Bilgi University Photography and Video Department in 2004 with scholarship. After receiving her BA degree in 2008, Türkkan worked as a photography course instructor in the Visual Communication Design Department of the same university. She continued her education in University of the Arts London, Central Saint Martins, College of Art and Design (London, UK), where she received her MA Fine Art degree in 2010. The artist participated in !f Istanbul Independent Film Festival (2007) and group shows at The Empire Project (Istanbul, 2011), Vol de Nuits (Marseille, 2011) and x-ist (Istanbul, 2010). In 2011, she opened her first solo show, ‘Looking Back at You’ at Operation Room Gallery, İstanbul and in 2012 her second solo show ‘Full Contact’ at x-ist. Her work from Pay Here series has participated in Christie’s auction Visions d’Orient, Paris (2011) and Sotheby’s auction Contemporary Art / Turkish, London (2012). 

The artist explains her outlook to life-art and photography as follows:

“For more than ten years photography has been the medium through which I have been exploring myself, digging out my fears, desires, intentions and concerns. I am very much interested in documentation; the documentation of myself, of the people, places and events I experience through personal impressions. In a way, photography allows me to face my inner conflicts and more specifically attempt to make peace with my own gender role and identity. I believe the act of taking and displaying photographs is, in most cases, similar to laying out the dirty laundry.”