My art practice is mainly based on comparative research in the cultural and political fields. My works align with a certain representative aesthetic and graphical exploration in particular focusing on the visual translation of languages by means of rejecting semantic frames. I have multiple research interests (touch upon directly and indirectly migration, cultural adaptation, and national identities).
Contemporary art is, to me, the question of consecrating anything to do with art and art per se, which is not complete without the viewer and its narration. Very personal response to the concerns of the present social, political world from the necessity of expressing oneself is the ultimate personal approach to my works. I am exploring different tools to translate that need for production into a form. Re-creating semiotic systems is my predominant conceptual reference origin to represent what I am living through. Personal founds and memories as art materials and my process transmit a sense of reality that manifests itself. My long architectural education permitted me to be experimental with structural tools and always think in the context of space and culture. My thesis subject especially helped me establish a comparative understanding of how epistemological differences of time and context are actually important to shaping cultures.
My works focus on the notion of language, text materials, alphabets, syntax, semantic frames, fragmentation, reality, and borders through the lens of research, digital painting, and mixed media techniques. I like to mesh up my determined understanding of reality by use of very personal stories, referring to stitching, calighraphy, other traditional Islamic art forms along with culural objetcs of my homeland (so-called Anatolia, somewhere in the middle east). Thanks to my upbringing even more my religious grandma, the abstractness of Islamic and also Anatolian art traditions, which are far beyond decorative craftsmanship, has an impact on my aesthetic sense. Especially customs such as rug weaving that uses symbology and the use of colors have a certain contemporariness with its purity.
The possibility of finding the meaning behind absurdity, the transmission between meaning and nonsense creates dynamism and adds the time element into art subjetcs. With multiple transitions of meanings and absurdity I can release my insecurities while feeding my pseudo-intellectualism -bringing important topics into the discourse such as identity, woman, time, culture, and ‘others’ – by means of patching mostly nonsense papers, texts, and alphabets.
Whom I like: Irma Blank, Maria Lai, George Maciunas, Erol Akyavaş, Jacques Village, Luis Barragan, Squeak Carnwath, Yasmine Nasser Diaz, Lara Assouad, and many other contemporary artists who embrace a critical approach duly creating a new aesthetic.
Latest Articles / Statements
Transnationalism in art, national pronouns, political correction etc.
Gender pronoun questions lead me to an epiphany about national pronouns. Certain ideologic/ patriotic assumptions tell us to accept what the national identity of our passports dictates. I am dreaming in near future the question of “what is your national pronoun?” will be the norm. I do not have a solid answer yet, most probably it will be something like “ohh, I do not believe in nation-states but I would say I am an ethnic cocktail. I am from Turkey.” Am I demanding too much policy discourse from the art world? Do I care because I am simply a migrant in Europe? >> read more
Multiculturalism and Museums
The western definition of culture based on the time-travelling approach, includes the tree-age system, ranked people who had less equipped as primitive in the hierarchic frame of ethnography. Urbanization and the industrial revolution are still considered the biggest human development in history therefore some civilizations owning them the very first creates the idea of privileged society. This brings the question of what makes a society primitive under what categorization. Hence, the question emerges how this western perspective applies to the exhibiting strategies? Assimilating or exoticizing?
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Critical remarks on Museum and problems of nationalism
Prussian Art Politics had a lot to do with shaping museum power in Germany. The 19th-century museum boom reflects upon the museum architecture by reviving the classical temple architecture elements in the museum exterior. The classical style of architecture represented the noble aspects of civilizations; hence it becomes the vocabulary of museum architecture within the ideological frame.
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