Cage of Flesh (Ten Kafesi), the most recent piece by the photorealist painter Taner Ceylan, engages with the politics of and the erotics within representation in Orientalist painting by confronting the viewer with a re-imagined figure of an odalisque. Following his highly acclaimed Lost Painting Series that featured Fake World (2011), 1640 (2011), 1879 (2011), 1923 (2010) and 1881 (2010), Cage of Flesh uses an ingenious amalgam of allusions to both Orientalist eroticisation of female flesh and the Sufi tradition of imagining the flesh as a cage of worldly desires. Referring to the infatuation of the Orientalist male gaze with Oriental female carnality, Ceylan envisages the flesh as a cage in which the odalisque is incarcerated. The reduction of "Oriental" woman to a silenced, oppressed and submissive body codified as beautiful, smooth and sensual flesh to invite and satisfy the Western male gaze deprives the odalisque of her individuality and renders her flesh a cage in which she is merely a body that cannot speak its name
