Ottomania presents a historical cross-section of Orientalist themed portraits from the last 500 years. Prevalent within European society for centuries the appropriation of Eastern culture reached its apex within the 19th century when European adaptation turned the signifiers of the East into easily digested symbols of exotica for Western consumption— images of men in turbans, the pageantry of theatrically embellished masculine dress, richly decorated fabrics, the codification of facial hair and the romantic settings of Ottoman or Persian court life.

Appropriating centuries of cultural appropriation itself, Ottomania presents not only an overview of Orientalist portraiture but the inherent theatricality of its subjects, emphasizing details wherein white Europeans deployed their Orientalist fetishes as a form of performative drag in a coded ploy to deviate from the everyday restrictions of class, gender, and sexual norms. Just as Uklański’s work The Nazis (1998)—a group of tightly cropped portraits of famous movie actors playing Third Reich soldiers—excavated the seductive regalia of the Nazism, with its pomp of militarized masculinity and its relationship to the nefarious ideologies of fascism, so does Ottomania seek to interrogate the interplay of meaning and ideology under the pageantry of this longstanding romance between East and West. - Bywater Bros. Editions