Turkina Faso is reshaping her multidisciplinary practice through stories of female identity, desire and everyday life

“I can’t stop taking pictures,” writes London-based photographer Turkina Faso in her ‘about’ section on her website. “Sometimes,” she confesses, “I think that it is done; everything is done. But after a few months, I feel that there is endless possibility to surprise myself and others.” It’s a perspective that has led to a multidisciplinary career in photography, fashion and documentary that is nothing short of prolific, and the kind of curiosity that has recently steered her into an entirely new exploration of narrative filmmaking. Drawing on all of her artistic experiences in image-making to date, the artist made the decision to step back slightly from the rush of one-off editorial fashion shoots and commercial campaigns over the last five years in order to create space for some very exciting independent film projects.

This new direction for Turkina’s freelance work was an intentional move to “reinvent my practice and gain new storytelling skills”. In her reevaluation of what’s most important in her creative work, she “put things on the table and looked at them precisely: what I really like and what I really want”, the photographer says. “I threw away the rest (ok, some put away into boxes) and decided to focus. It is hard when you like many things... I like too many things and am interested in way too many things.”

As a functioning multi-hyphenate but with “more precise goals and a less hectic rhythm”, Turkina has shaped a number of new projects with moving image over the past year. This includes her narrative short Piss ’n’ Chips following a protagonist called Barbie – “a young woman who rejects her reality and attempts to find escape in love” – and Changing Rooms, the photographer’s performance video that captures the pre- and post-gym routine of women which was selected by Photo Vogue’s Women by Women festival earlier this year.

Changing Rooms arrived following the birth of the photographer’s son in 2023: “I’d just had a baby; my only way to unwind, relax and feel like myself again was going to my gym... Like every day, at least for an hour,” Turkina says. “I think those who have experience with little ones can imagine how much pressure it could be, and this little routine really helped me to survive the hardest years.” By looking at the daily rituals that shaped these visits for herself and others with a new lens, the director started to picture even the most mundane and liminal spaces (such as the gym’s changing room) as a stage for something more. “All the attendees seemed like performers with set roles and choreography. I imagined what if I made a piece about this synergy; what could it be?”

The beautiful ten-minute short and performance, choreographed by Morgaine Ann de Leonardis and edited by Vera Romanova, not only explores the awkwardness and vulnerability of being undressed in public but reveals the changing room to be a space “never entirely free from scrutiny”, Turkina says. “It is about the female body as a site of power, beauty, labour, exposure, violence, control and politics. It is never just a body.”

As a new mother, Turkina has also been interested in exploring parenthood and female identity in this pursuit of more moving image, which came to the surface in Piss ’n’ Chips. Initially an idea for a simple collaboration for a screenplay with friend and director Anton Yarush, who lives in Ramsgate – “We desperately wanted to film something by the sea and specifically at the Brasserie in the port,” says Turkina – the short grew into something much more. “In the end, we shot on 16mm over three days with a relatively large crew for this kind of budget level, and we had seven people in the cast, excluding extras. So it was the opposite of what we had planned,” she says. In another collaboration with Vera Romanova, the film explores love, identity and desire against the backdrop of a British seaside town in summer and its “strange but familiar” everyday life, which premiered at the Manchester Film Festival early this year.

A combination of elements have fascinated Turkina in this foray into cinema. Perhaps from her background in image making, colour, framing, set design and storytelling all play a large part – skills now amplified and put into a new form – but the level of collaboration that film demands has been the most exciting element to any project. “I greatly appreciate working with large teams; I think it is the hardest but also the best part. We are all making it; it is not me.”