I graduated from the Painting and Art Education Department at Dicle University in 2004. However, my relationship with art education had already begun during my university years, in 2001, through the work I carried out with children working on the streets of Diyarbakır. Meeting the Association for the Development of Social and Cultural Life (SKYGD) at that time became an important turning point in my life. I received training from Sonja Bohländer Tanrısever, Zafer Kırac, Serra Müderrisoğlu, Serpil Deniz, Gokhan Deniz, Gazi Selcuk, Sadan Selvi, Cengiz Çiftçi and Abdullah Katay in children’s rights, community-based social work, pedagogy, art education and the Reggio Emilia approach. We received various forms of training at SKYGD for approximately two years. Following this process, in 2003, we founded the Association for Children Under One Roof. In this way, we established a local organisation and began extending our work with children beyond Diyarbakir to different cities in the region. During those years, I also began to experience art as not merely something that is produced, but as a powerful language through which people can express themselves and establish relationships with others.

I have been working in art education with children and young people for approximately 25 years. I have carried out projects with children who have experienced social exclusion and forced migration, as well as with children living in refugee camps, in different cities across Turkey. Between 2007 and 2026, I continued my work in art education at various private schools. In addition, I conducted workshops with people of different ages and from different social groups through non-governmental organisations, museums, art institutions, a psychiatric hospital and a prison. Over time, I also worked in different areas such as content development and curating.

As an artist, I move between different forms of expression, including painting, video, photography, objects and installation. Memory, nature, belonging, migration, the body and transformation have long been at the centre of my work. For me, what matters more than the material I use is the question I pursue; over time, that question finds its own language and medium.

I do not see my artistic practice and my work in art education as separate from one another. Both are about being curious, observing, asking questions, encountering others and being able to look at the world differently. I would describe myself, in the simplest terms, as an artist and art educator who thinks, creates and continues to learn through art.

” From the Artist’s Photographic Archive ”

2. Your practice moves between video, photography, painting and participatory forms of production at different periods, creating a field of research that is not bound to a single medium. How is the relationship between thought and form established in your art? What determines the process through which an idea becomes a visual language?

For me, the process of making often begins with a question. I do not define myself solely as a painter, video artist or photographer. First there is a thought, a feeling or an issue; then that issue finds its own form of expression.

My relationship with video began in my second year at university. While studying art history, I encountered video art, and I was particularly interested in the work of Nam June Paik. At the time, my friend Endam Acar and I were making and editing videos and experimenting with different approaches. Sener Ozmen also made an important contribution during that period. He would watch our work and share his criticisms with us. These encounters encouraged us to focus more closely on what we wanted to say. I gradually began searching for ways to tell my own story.

I presented one of my first video works to the public at Diyarbakir Sanat Merkezi in 2003. In 2007, I participated in the 10th Istanbul Biennial with a video work. At that time, I was known primarily for my video works.

But painting had been part of my life much earlier. I remember drawing with pastel crayons on top of the stove when I was around four years old. The paint would melt and disappear; I would draw again, and it would disappear again. It was a magical moment for me.

Perhaps for this reason, I do not see video, painting and photography as completely separate fields. Sometimes a thought needs video, sometimes photography, and sometimes painting. Rather than choosing a technique, I follow a question; over time, that question finds its own medium.

” Nonexistence ” Video Art Performance

3. The Istanbul Biennial, Sinopale, Mardin Biennial and various international art platforms correspond to different periods of your artistic practice. When you consider these encounters not simply as exhibition experiences but as thresholds that shaped your thinking as an artist, what traces did each of them leave on you?

Participating in the Istanbul Biennial in 2007 was an important threshold for me. It was one of the first international art events in which I participated professionally, and it also increased my visibility within the art world. I took part in the project Gece Gezenler with a video work. One of the most striking aspects of the project for me was that the works were taken to 52 different locations in Istanbul where film screenings had not previously been held. In this way, the video encountered not only the biennial audience but also very different people in different neighbourhoods and living environments. This experience made me think more deeply about where and with whom an artwork encounters its audience.

Sinopale was a different kind of experience. There, together with Sonja Bohländer Tanrısever, Esin Tanrısever, Gazi Selcuk and Niyazi Selcuk, we conducted workshops with children over approximately 15 days. We also exhibited the works produced by the children alongside the biennial. What became important for me this time was not exhibiting my own work, but producing together and the social dimension of art.

The Mardin Biennial corresponded to a later period of my practice. My video work Ey Su was exhibited there. It was a period in which my thoughts on water, memory and geography became more pronounced.

Looking back today, I see that each of these encounters left a different trace. The Istanbul Biennial was an important threshold in terms of encountering different audiences and visibility; Sinopale in terms of producing and sharing together; and the Mardin Biennial in terms of confronting the issues that were deepening within my own practice.

” The Memory of Water ” Oil on Canvas 100×120 cm , Firat Bingol 2022

4. In your recent project Experience Rooms: Play, Memory and Shared Images, realised as part of the Cappadocia Biennial, you worked with children and young people on collective production, the transformation of individual traces into a shared memory, and the establishment of art through experience. How does this approach intersect with the concepts of memory and transformation in your individual artistic practice?

Experience Rooms, which I realised as part of the Cappadocia Biennial, was a three-stage project I developed around experiencing together with young people and discovering art as a language of expression.

In the first room, we gathered in a circle and talked about our individual differences through the idea that “everyone is equal, everyone is different.” In the second room, we worked with basic emotions. I asked participants to express emotions such as love, fear, anger or excitement using only lines, without using pictures, shapes or symbols. The aim was to remove judgements such as “drawing well” or “drawing badly” and to create a space in which everyone could express themselves freely.

The third room focused on sound, music, colour and movement. With their eyes closed, participants listened to different kinds of music and experienced the emotions evoked by the music through colour and movement.

What was important to me about this project was establishing art not merely through the aesthetic object that emerges at the end, but through the experience itself. We still encounter the idea that painting belongs only to “talented” people or that art is a hobby. Yet I see art as one of the fundamental languages through which people can express themselves.

This project also intersects with my own practice here. For me, memory and transformation are not only subjects of the artwork; they are also connected to the trace that the experience of making leaves on a person. In Experience Rooms, what mattered to me was not so much the result that emerged, but how a person moved through the experience and how they emerged from it changed.

”Cappadocia Biennial . from the Artist’s Photographic Archive ”

5. In your recent works, the boundaries between the human body and natural forms have become increasingly permeable. What kind of artistic thinking lies behind your decision to consider the human being not as a subject separate from nature, but as a transforming part of it?

My relationship with nature goes further back than my recent works. The nature and art camps we organised with children and families in 2015–2016 were an important starting point for me. During that period, I began carrying my notebook with me and drawing trees, and over time these drawings developed into a tree series.

Years later, while I was again in nature, I was lying beneath a tree and watching it. Suddenly, I experienced a state that is difficult to describe. It was as though I was breathing together with the tree; I was inside it, and it was inside me. Perhaps it was a moment when I physically felt something we already know but have forgotten in everyday life: human beings are not separate from nature.

For this reason, I do not think of the human body in my work as a form independent from nature. Nor do I believe there are such definitive boundaries between a tree, water, the human body or another natural form as the boundaries we draw ourselves. Human beings exist within nature, as one of its transforming parts. The intertwining of human bodies and natural forms in my work comes from this idea of placing the human not at the centre of nature, but within it.

”Double Peace ” watercolor on paper 18×24 cm , Firat Bingol 2025

6. The tree is an important recurring image in works such as Tree Series, Freedom Hope, Double Peace and Self Viator. What does the persistence of an image for such a long period within your artistic practice mean to you? Has the tree become a symbol whose meaning has been fixed over time, or an open field of research that you reconsider in each work?

The long presence of the tree image in my practice is directly connected to my relationship with nature. The process that began with Tree Series gradually transformed into different forms and spread into other works.

In works such as Freedom Hope, Double Peace and Self Viator, I bring different symbols together. For example, a hand making a victory sign transforming into an olive tree, or a dove becoming integrated with an olive tree. There is a state of becoming one between two separate forms, as well as an intention. Concepts such as freedom, hope and peace reinforce one another within a single image.

The reason the tree has remained in my practice for such a long time is that, for me, it is not a completed symbol with a fixed meaning. In each new work, it can connect with another form or concept; it can establish new relationships with water, the body and other elements of nature. Therefore, rather than repeating the tree, I look at the same image again at different times and through different experiences.

” Integrate with Nature ” Oil on Canvas , Firat Bingol 2025

7. With Self Viator, the concepts of rooting, belonging and movement become more pronounced. When you think about the human desire both to belong to a place and to remain constantly in motion, how do you understand the relationship between belonging and freedom?

In Self Viator, I think about rooting, belonging and movement in direct relation to the human being. Here again, I begin with the tree. As a tree takes root deeper into the soil, its connection with the place where it exists becomes stronger; at the same time, it rises towards the sky. In other words, there is simultaneous growth both inward and outward.

I think something similar is true for human beings. Pursuing the question “Who am I?” and discovering one’s own roots, belongings and depth is also a form of liberation. As a person comes to know themselves and where they come from, their relationship with the world also expands.

For this reason, I do not see belonging and freedom as opposites. For me, taking root does not mean becoming fixed; it means being able to move while knowing one’s roots and remaining open to new encounters.

” In the Shadow of the Olive Tree with Vincent van Gogh” Ink pen on paper 55×70 cm , Firat Bingol 2022

” From the Artist’s Photographic Archive ”

8. In works such as Freedom Hope and Double Peace, you approach concepts with broad social connotations, such as hope, freedom and peace, through images of nature. Why do you construct these concepts through natural forms rather than representing them directly?

Because I believe that the hope, freedom and peace that are valid for human beings are also valid for nature. I do not see these concepts as belonging only to humanity.

In works such as Freedom Hope and Double Peace, nature is not a background that I use to describe these concepts; it is directly part of the issue itself. Just as human beings need freedom, nature also needs a space in which it can sustain its own existence and cycles.

Therefore, when we ask for hope, freedom and peace for human beings, we cannot think of these things independently of nature. Human freedom and the freedom of nature are not separate from one another.

”Freedom Hope ” watercolor on paper 18×24 cm , Firat Bingol 2025

9. In the idea of The Memory of Water, you associate water with concepts of flow, trace, time and change. From what intellectual space did the idea of the memory of water emerge for you, and how has this concept found a place within your artistic practice over time?

The idea of The Memory of Water first emerged for me around 2016–2017. Initially, I encountered a story concerning the relationship between the Kurdish poet Fakî-yi Teyran, who lived in the 15th century, and the Tigris River. It was said that he would enter the Tigris at certain times of the day and recite poems to the river. The idea of a person speaking their words, their poetry, to water, and the water carrying those words elsewhere, affected me deeply.

This thought later developed into a nine-minute video work titled Ey Su. I made the work approximately fifteen days before Hasankeyf was submerged. In the video, I constructed a narrative around a person’s encounter with water, confronting their own reflection, expressing intentions to the water and releasing words into the flow of the water. In this way, water gradually ceased to be merely an element of nature for me and began to become a presence carrying the memory of people, geography and time.

Afterwards, my curiosity gradually deepened. An area of research emerged that extended from the scientific structure of water to the meanings it carries in different cultures and in Sufism, from its relationship with life to its microscopic world. Over time, these ideas also entered the visual world of my work. I sometimes think about water through the movement of a drop, sometimes through structures that evoke subatomic particles and DNA forms, and sometimes through forms of life emerging in the depths of the sea.

I am currently working on a solo exhibition centred on water. This process, in which I bring together video, painting and new works, is somewhat like a laboratory for me. Rather than reaching a definite answer, I am following the new questions opened up by water.

” Ey Su ” , O Water , Video Performance – Firat Bingol

“A Moment Before” Oil on canvas 50 × 70 cm , 2026

” States of Water ” – 2 , 55×38 cm , Graphite on Paper 2022 , Firat Bingol

10. Your long-term work with children and young people demonstrates that art education in your practice is not merely a pedagogical field. How have children’s and young people’s ways of looking, questioning and constructing images influenced your way of seeing and creating as an artist?

I can say that my many years of work with children and young people have contributed a great deal to me. Working particularly with the 0–5 age group during early childhood was very instructive for me and allowed me to recognise many things about my own way of seeing.

Children look at the world from a much more direct place. They often say what they want to say without going around it, and they express their emotions and curiosity more openly. They have a field of expression that has not yet been heavily shaped by judgements such as “Is it right or wrong? Is it beautiful or ugly?” They can give completely different meanings to a line, a colour, an object or something we might consider ordinary. Seeing this has influenced the way I look as an artist as well.

I think one of the most important things working with children has given me is the reminder of how valuable it is to preserve a sense of curiosity and the ability to look directly. I have been teaching children and young people for many years, but particularly my experiences in early childhood have shown me something: in fact, there is also a great deal that we can learn from children.

” From the Artist’s Photographic Archive ”

11. From your curatorial experience at the 2018 Istanbul Children’s and Young People’s Art Biennial to your work today, your identities as an artist, educator and curator have created different but interconnected fields of production. When you think about these three areas together today, where do you think art truly begins for you: in the artwork itself, in the process of making, or in the relationships it establishes between people?

My curatorial experience at the 2018 Istanbul Children’s and Young People’s Art Biennial was a process that came together with the experience I had gained through my many years of working with children. We were engaged in a more collective form of working there. Bringing different forms of production, people and ideas together was important to me.

Today, I do not see my identities as an artist, educator and curator as separate fields. Producing, learning, sharing and establishing relationships with others are complementary processes.

For this reason, I do not think that art begins or ends only with the artwork that emerges. The artwork is of course important, but the production process leading up to it, the discoveries and encounters that take place during that process are also part of the work. Then comes the moment when the artwork encounters other people and establishes new relationships there.

For me, the artwork, the process and the encounter are not separate from one another. Art emerges precisely at the intersection of these.

” From the Artist’s Photographic Archive ”

12. Throughout your practice from the early 2000s to the present, memory, nature, the body, movement, belonging and transformation have been connected in different ways. Beyond all these concepts, what is the fundamental question you are still searching for an answer to today, and where is this question taking you in your future work?

I am not entirely sure whether there is still one fundamental question for which I am searching for an answer. Perhaps, for me, the real issue is not the question itself but the continuation of curiosity.

My relationship with art is about love, passion and truly connecting with what you do. As people live, they change. We are not separate from nature either; we are constantly changing together with it. As we change, our way of looking at the world, the questions we ask and the areas we are curious about also change.

Sometimes, years later, I find myself moving around the same concepts. Memory, nature, belonging, the body and transformation are not subjects that can easily be completed and left behind for me. Perhaps the questions remain the same, but because I change, the place from which I look at them and the way I express them also change.

I think I can describe my relationship with art like this: We have something that concerns us, and we search for a language through which we can express that concern. For me, art is a space in which this language is continually rediscovered. As long as I remain curious, continue asking questions and searching for new ways of expressing myself, I believe my production will continue.

I do not want to know in advance where it will take me. Perhaps that uncertainty is precisely why art is still exciting for me.

” From the Artist’s Photographic Archive ”

I am a painter born in Silvan who continues his practice today in his studio in Diyarbakir. I shape my artistic practice around the contradictions I encounter in life, the tension between the individual and society, power relations, humanity’s troubled relationship with nature, and the fractures created by all of these.

My journey began with the toys I made out of mud while living in the village. After I started school, I discovered painting. During primary school, the drawings my uncle made using carbon paper sparked a great curiosity in me. At the time, I did not know that this would become the centre of my life; but painting gradually became my way of understanding and making sense of the world.

Growing up in Silvan gave me more than particular landscapes and images. It also allowed me to observe human relationships, state violence, social pressures, prohibitions, resistance, solidarity, conflict, loss, and a sense of belonging from a very early age.

At Diyarbakir Fine Arts High School, my relationship with painting became more conscious and focused. I then studied Traditional Turkish Handicrafts, followed by Painting, at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University. Istanbul allowed me to encounter different approaches to art and to look at my own practice from an intellectual distance. Nevertheless, I always had a desire to return to Diyarbakir.

My return was not a retreat, but a conscious choice. I do not believe that an artist can exist only in places regarded as centres. On the contrary, I think being away from the centre can be advantageous for an artist in many ways.

The geography I have lived in has a strong presence in my work; however, I do not want to confine my paintings within a purely regional narrative. I believe that an emotion or experience originating here can reach issues shared by humanity as a whole. For me, the local and the universal are not opposites; they are two fields that open into one another. My studio in Diyarbakir is also a space of thought where I constantly establish connections between my past, my present life, and what is happening in the world.

Dürtü 80×60 cm T.U.Y.B 2026

2. Looking at your early works, the exhibitions Arayis and Zamanin Imgeleri, and then your works Aporia and Shadows from 2025, we can see a clear transformation. Do you consider this transformation merely a formal change, or does it also reflect a transformation in the way you look at the world, your conceptual approach, and the questions you ask?

I do not see this transformation merely as a formal change. The change in form is the visible result of a transformation in the way I look at the world and in my relationship with the questions I ask.

During my student years, my works were mostly direct paintings based on the relationship between nature and humanity—simpler and somewhat romantic. During the period in which the works for Arayis and Zamanin Imgeleri were created, intellectual and social issues began to become more prominent.

In works such as Ak ve Kara Diyalektigi, Erk ve Umut, Namus Bekcileri, Orta Dogu Tanricasi, and Adem’in Torunlari, I was dealing more explicitly with issues of opposition, belief, power, gender, birth, and existence through clearer symbols and distinct figures. The allegorical structure of the paintings was more legible, and the encounters between the images were more direct.

Aporia and Shadows marked a period in which this approach moved into a more questioning territory. I am no longer concerned only with showing a social condition, but with understanding how that condition is produced and how it becomes embedded in human thought. Differences in thought and perception, and the contradictions contained within reality itself, have become increasingly important to me.

So my concerns have not completely changed; they have deepened, and my way of expressing them has transformed. Previously, I would ask, “What is the problem?” Today, I am more interested in asking, “How does this problem become embedded within a person, how is it passed from one generation to another, and how does it become a structure that we collectively create?”

The transformation is both formal and conceptual; yet there is continuity rather than a rupture between the past and the present.

Gölgeler (shadows) 140×140 T.U.Y.B 2025

3. You describe your practice as being built around “the conflict of oppositions in life.” What intellectual function does the concept of opposition serve in your practice? How does the transformation of seemingly opposing elements into structures that eventually produce one another find its way into your paintings?

For me, opposition is not simply about placing two contradictory elements side by side. It is a form of relationship in which things that appear to be opposed gradually produce, nourish, and even transform into one another.

I do not believe there are absolute and unchanging boundaries between good and evil, innocence and violence, hope and despair, birth and death, freedom and power. The idea of peace can become a tool of power; a process that begins in the name of security can produce oppression; an individual who seeks freedom can, once they gain power, restrict someone else’s freedom. At times, even the boundary between victim and perpetrator can shift over time. This does not eliminate responsibility; it demonstrates how easily power can reproduce itself.

In my paintings, oppositions also make one another visible. A disturbing event may exist within vivid and attractive colours. An image that appears childlike or innocent may occupy the same surface as weapons or destruction. While an egg represents the beginning of life, once broken it can become a sign of wasted potential and loss. A rose may carry beauty and love, while also containing danger and vulnerability through its thorns.

For this reason, opposition is not an outcome for me, but a method that sets thought in motion. When I consider a concept together with its opposite, another reality hidden within it emerges. The meaning of the painting does not appear where we choose one of the two extremes, but in the tension between them.

Soylenemeyenin Bicimi 60×60 cm T.U.Y.B 2026

4. In your paintings, there are moments where the absurd and the tragic, the everyday and the uncanny meet on the same surface. Do you think painting reconstructs reality, or does it reveal contradictions that already exist within everyday life but have become invisible?

I think painting does both. While revealing contradictions that already exist within the reality we inhabit but that we have become unable to see through familiarity, it also reconstructs them within a new order.

Everyday life is often no less absurd than the scenes in my paintings. We are constantly confronted with violence, loss, and injustice. After a while, we begin to watch even the most severe events as if they were ordinary news. The tragic becomes part of everyday life; the extraordinary is accepted as normal. This invisibility also emerges from this state of habituation.

I do not try to reproduce reality as it is or create a document of an event that has taken place. I separate fragments I take from reality, transform them, and bring them together within unexpected relationships. In this way, the familiar becomes unfamiliar.

The viewer may initially encounter a scene that appears colourful, fairy-tale-like, or humorous; but when they look a little longer, they begin to notice the unease, violence, or power relations within the painting.

I do not use the absurd to soften tragedy. On the contrary, I use it to show how tragedy becomes normalised. Rather than directly explaining what is invisible, painting offers me a space in which I can rearrange what is visible and encourage the viewer to question their own habits of seeing.

Eşik 60×60 cm T.U.Y.B 2026

5. The conflict between the individual and social norms, power relations, and the transformation of an individual who gains power into an authoritarian figure are important currents within your practice. You approach power not only as a force imposed from outside, but as a mechanism that becomes embedded within the individual and is reproduced over time. Why does this transformation concern you so deeply?

Because power is not only the state, institutions, rulers, or an overt force imposed from outside. It also operates within the family, social roles, traditions, gender relations, everyday language, and the relationship a person establishes with themselves. Over time, it becomes embedded in an individual’s behaviour and way of thinking.

One of the fundamental issues that concerns me is that a person who opposes power can begin to resemble the structure they opposed once they acquire power themselves. A person who has been subjected to oppression can impose the same oppression on someone else. An individual who demands freedom can narrow another person’s space of existence when they make their own ideas absolute. In this way, power ceases to be merely a structure operating from the top down; it is constantly reproduced by people within everyday life.

It seems incomplete to me to portray power only as an external enemy. Without seeing its counterpart within ourselves, we cannot truly confront it. My paintings, in a way, place the viewer before this uncomfortable possibility: we may also be sustaining, through our own behaviour, a small part of the structure we criticise.

Bekleyenler 60×60 cm T.U.Y.B 2025

6. You also speak of power as creating a form of perception. How do these invisible mechanisms, which operate upon what we see, what we do not see, and what we accept as real, become visible within your paintings?

Power shapes not only our behaviour but also our way of looking. It determines what we see as normal, what we see as dangerous, whom we see as a hero and whom we see as an enemy. It does not always do this through an explicit command; it operates through images, repetition, fears, assumptions, and everyday language. After a while, we can begin to mistake the way of seeing we have been taught for our own thinking.

Rather than presenting a single authoritarian figure that directly represents this mechanism, I try to make its consequences visible in my paintings. Figures looking in the same direction, gathering around a particular idea, resembling one another, or becoming a single social body are all parts of this structure. Repetition, directed gazes, differences in scale, and the disappearance of certain figures within a crowd also point to the way perception is constructed.

Empty spaces and shadows are important in this respect as well. What is not shown can sometimes be more decisive than what is shown. I think of the shadow not merely as the physical consequence of light, but as a counterpart to what is suppressed, fear, invisible violence, and the authority growing within the individual.

In a painting, I first draw the viewer’s gaze towards a particular point, and then I want them to question that initial gaze. Because the first step towards confronting the perception constructed by power is to recognise that the reality presented to us is not the only or immutable reality.

Hilgir/Taşiyici 100×100 cm T.U.Y.B 2026

7. You address the domination of women and nature under the patriarchal order within the same intellectual framework. What connection do you establish between the objectification of women and nature? Is it possible to read the rupture in the human–nature relationship not only as an ecological crisis, but also as humanity’s estrangement from its own roots and from itself?

Patriarchal thinking approaches both women and nature as entities over which rights can be claimed, which can be controlled, and which can be used according to need. The structure that seeks to exercise authority over women’s bodies, labour, and lives draws from the same language of domination as the understanding of nature as an unlimited resource.

Here, I am not establishing an essentialist or biological identification between women and nature. Equating women with nature can itself become another form of categorisation. What interests me is that both are objectified by a similar logic of power. This logic transforms life from something that has value in itself into a field to be possessed, controlled, and exploited for benefit.

As humanity moves away from nature, it does not only create an ecological crisis; it also loses the forms of relationship upon which its own existence depends. As people sever their connections with the soil, animals, seasons, and other living beings, they increasingly place themselves at the centre of all life. As a result, they become alienated both from nature and from themselves.

Yolculuk serisi – mola 100×100 cm T.U.Y.B 2025

8. Images such as the egg, broken egg, rose, bird, mouse, dead tree, desert, dry earth, and the empty space of the sky repeatedly appear in your practice. Do these images carry fixed meanings for you as part of a symbolic system, or are they living elements that acquire new meanings within the context of each work? What transforms an object into an intellectual image within a painting?

These images have fundamental meanings for me; however, I do not see them as a closed and unchanging dictionary of symbols. Each image acquires a new meaning according to the painting in which it exists and the other elements surrounding it.

For me, the egg is the essence of life, birth, potential, and a new beginning. Yet it is also extremely fragile. In Aporia, the egg becomes an uncertain possibility that is being protected in the midst of impasse and exhaustion. The broken egg does not simply signify death; it also carries the meaning of an unrealised possibility, hope that has come to nothing, and lost wholeness.

Similarly, the rose contains both beauty and love, as well as vulnerability. A fallen rose petal evokes the passage of time and fading memory. A bird can represent freedom, while depending on its context, it can also become a witness to an approaching danger. Mice can make our suppressed and unwanted sides visible, while at the same time being read as resilient beings that continue to live within destruction.

What transforms an object into an intellectual image is not the object itself alone. Its position within the painting, its scale, its relationship with other images, the way it is repeated, and the associations it awakens in the viewer’s memory all create this transformation.

I give my images an initial meaning; however, I believe they need to remain open to new relationships and different interpretations in order to remain alive within the painting.

Yeniden insan 120×100 cm T.U.Y.B 2026

9. The concept of Aporia evokes impasse, irresolution, and the moment when thought encounters its own limits. When you look through cracks, empty spaces, and ruins, is rupture an ending for you, or a threshold from which a new meaning can emerge?

For me, rupture contains both loss and a new possibility. I do not think every rupture is inherently healing or transformative. Some ruptures lead to irreversible losses. For this reason, I do not want to romanticise pain. Yet rupture can make a concealed truth visible and reveal how fragile the established order actually is.

For me, the concept of Aporia expresses the moment when thought cannot find a way out and encounters its own limits. The figures in the painting hold on to one another, while at the same time carrying each other’s weight. The egg at the centre is not a definite promise of salvation; it is a fragile possibility that has not yet been realised and needs to be protected. The presence of hope within an impasse does not mean that the impasse has disappeared.

Cracks, empty spaces, and ruins function in a similar way. A crack shows that wholeness has been disrupted, while it can also reveal another layer that had remained hidden within. An empty space is not merely an absence; it can also be a space where a new meaning may take root. A ruin carries traces of what happened in the past while making us question what the future will be built upon.

Therefore, I see rupture neither simply as an ending nor as an easy rebirth. For me, rupture is a threshold where confrontation begins. Whether a new meaning emerges depends on what we do with that confrontation.

Aporia 170×140 cm T.U.Y.B 2025

10. Are there artists, thinkers, writers, or fields outside art that nourish your practice? When speaking about the names that have inspired you, can we say that it is not only their aesthetic languages but also their ways of thinking that have touched your work? What most often sets you on the path towards a new painting today: an image, an idea, or a question?

Of course, there are artists, writers, and thinkers who nourish me. However, I do not see the question of influence simply as a list of names. Sometimes, rather than relating to an artist’s formal language, I connect with their way of looking at the world. Before how a work is made, I am more interested in why it was made and which question it leaves open.

The long relationship between art history and the use of the figure, light, allegory, and symbolism nourishes my practice. Mythological and religious narratives are not sources that offer ready-made answers for me; rather, they are fields of collective memory through which humanity’s relationship with power, guilt, belief, fear, birth, and death can be read again and again.

I also think that my education in Traditional Turkish Handicrafts has left traces in my relationship with detail, surface, motif, and patience.

Literature, philosophy, history, social events, nature, and ordinary objects I encounter in everyday life are also part of my practice. Sometimes it is a piece of news, sometimes an image from childhood, and sometimes a dry tree standing alone in the desert that can remain in my mind for a long time.

A new painting often begins with a question. The image then develops around that question. At other times, however, an image I encounter can give rise to a question I have not yet been able to name. So there is no one-way relationship between idea and image.

What matters to me is that the question at the beginning is not completely answered when the painting is finished; instead, it remains capable of opening onto other questions.

Piyonlar 20×20 cm T.U.Y.B 2023

11. There is a strong transition between individual and collective memory in your works. How do you think a personal experience becomes a shared image that can resonate within the memories of other people? Does the viewer finding their own experience within the work mean that the work has been completed for you?

Personal memory is never entirely ours alone. What we remember becomes intertwined with our families, the geography we live in, social events, and the stories of others. Therefore, personal experience often contains traces of collective memory.

I do not try to paint an event I have experienced or witnessed exactly as it happened. I carry it in my mind over time, distance it from certain details, and bring it into relation with other images. In this way, an experience belonging to a particular person or event transforms into a more open structure with which others can connect through their own memories.

An image belonging to Silvan or Diyarbakir may be part of a very personal memory for me. Yet the dry earth, a waiting figure, a broken egg, or a distant sky in a painting may evoke an entirely different loss, migration, or state of waiting in another viewer.

The image becoming shared does not mean that it loses its origin. On the contrary, it gains a reality capable of reaching others precisely because it emerges from a specific place and experience.

For me, the viewer finding their own experience within the work is an important stage in its life. The moment a painting leaves the studio, it moves away from being mine alone. However, the viewer’s interpretation does not transform the work into an unlimited and entirely random field either.

The relationships established by the painting, its colours, figures, and symbols create a direction; the viewer, with their own memory, opens a new path within that direction. In a sense, the work continues to live through this encounter.

Sirat’a Dogru 170×150 cm T.U.Y.B 2017

12. When you look at your current practice through works such as Aporia and Shadows, what is the issue you have carried from the past into the present but still cannot answer? Is the unresolved question that keeps you painting still in the same place, or does it transform into another question as you continue to create?

The issue I have been thinking about since childhood and still cannot answer is humanity’s desire to dominate other people and other living beings. Why does a being capable of understanding the consequences of its actions still want to restrict another person’s freedom and subject them to its own will?

Moreover, we see that a person who has been subjected to domination can reproduce the same system when they gain power. Humanity’s domination over animals is another form of this. The answers given to this question still do not satisfy me.

Perhaps this is the question that keeps me painting: Why, despite our awareness, can humanity not give up the desire to dominate?

Ruzgarin Buyumedigi Yer 80×80 cm T.U.Y.B 2025

13. When we consider your entire body of work along a single intellectual line, a world emerges that extends from oppositions to power, from nature to ecology, from symbols to memory, and from rupture to rebirth. What is Omer Eken actually pursuing today? If you had to define your artistic practice not with a single concept, but with a single question, what would that question be?

Today, I am pursuing the possibility of a different way for humanity to relate to itself, to other people, and to nature. The oppositions, power, memory, ecological destruction, and images of rebirth within my practice are different faces of this search.

If I had to define my artistic practice through a single question, I would ask:

“Can humanity create another way of existing alongside other forms of life—animals and nature—by establishing a genuinely egalitarian and just order, both within itself and in its relationship with the world, without oppressing, destroying, or dominating?”

Vecd 150×100 cm T.U.Y.B 2024

Umut 100×120 cm T.U.Y.B 2012 

In Malaysia, batik painting, pioneered by Chuah Thean Teng, brought everyday life, the human figure, and local culture into the sphere of artistic representation, narrowing the distance between batik and fine art. The recognition of artists such as Chuah Thean Teng, Khalil Ibrahim, Ismail Mat Hussin, Tay Mo Leong, and Yong Cheng Wah as important representatives of batik painting within the collection and exhibition programmes of Bank Negara Malaysia demonstrates that this transformation has also gained recognition within institutional art history.

Within this historical context, Erhan Şanal’s batik practice constitutes a noteworthy example of how a traditional textile technique can be reconsidered within the expressive possibilities of contemporary art in Turkey. Şanal is not merely an artist who employs the wax-batik technique; he is also a practitioner attempting to make visible once again a form of knowledge that is gradually disappearing. In the artist’s own words, one of the central aims of his practice is to revive the wax-batik tradition once used in Turkey and to transmit it to future generations.

For this reason, understanding Şanal’s work requires looking beyond the formal characteristics of his artworks to consider the position of the technique within cultural memory. The modernisation of batik art has developed differently across different geographies. In Malaysia, while Chuah Thean Teng transformed the batik surface into a field for the representation of everyday life, the human figure, and local culture, Fatimah Chik developed a more abstract and stylised language, reinterpreting elements drawn from flora, fauna, and Nusantara architecture through a contemporary formal vocabulary. According to an assessment by Ilham Gallery, Chik is among the artists who have expanded the boundaries of batik painting by drawing upon traditional craft techniques.

At this point, an important parallel emerges with Şanal’s approach.

In both practices, the traditional technique is not treated as an immutable form belonging to the past. Rather, the technique is transferred into a new visual and conceptual context through the artist’s intervention.

Yet Şanal’s position emerges from a different historical ground. While batik has become an important marker of national and cultural identity in Malaysia and Indonesia, wax batik has occupied a more limited position within artistic circles in Turkey. Şanal’s practice can therefore be read not only as an aesthetic production, but also as an attempt to reposition a fading technique within cultural memory.

In Şanal’s practice, material becomes the carrier of thought.

The movement of wax across the fabric restricts the spread of the dye. Yet this boundary is never absolute. The texture of the fabric, the way the dye is absorbed, and the variations that occur during the process continuously transform the final result.

The fundamental tension that emerges here is between control and chance. The artist determines the composition; however, the material does not always submit entirely to the artist’s decisions.

This is one of the most significant characteristics distinguishing batik from conventional painting. While paint applied to a canvas can be controlled to a greater degree, fabric receives the dye according to its own physical properties. A reciprocal negotiation therefore emerges between the artist and the material. In Şanal’s work, this negotiation becomes not merely a technical matter but an aesthetic method.

The artist designs; the material completes.

The resulting work is therefore not simply the execution of a preliminary design conceived in the artist’s mind. The artwork emerges at the point where design intersects with the behaviour of the material.

When positioning Şanal’s practice within the broader history of batik, the Indonesian artist Amri Yahya becomes a particularly significant point of reference. Ilham Gallery identifies Yahya as one of the pioneers of batik painting in Indonesia. He is noted for experimenting with batik from the 1960s onwards and for exhibiting his batik paintings from 1974 onwards.

Yahya’s approach demonstrates that batik can function not merely as part of textile production but as a pictorial form of expression in its own right.

Similarly, Şanal’s practice transforms fabric from a decorative object into a surface for pictorial portraiture.

At this point, batik ceases to be simply “pattern on fabric” and becomes a way of thinking through fabric.

Another dimension of the relationship between batik and painting can be observed through the work of Srihadi Soedarsono. Raised in a family of batik producers, Soedarsono developed a practice in which Javanese culture became an important point of reference, establishing a distinctive relationship between traditional culture and modernist painting. Rather than remaining directly bound to the batik technique itself, Soedarsono transformed the visual and intellectual legacy of batik culture through the language of modern painting.

This approach provides an important point of comparison for Şanal.

The influence of a traditional technique on contemporary art is not limited to the direct use of that technique. Tradition can also shape an artist’s understanding of form, perception of surface, sense of rhythm, and relationship with cultural memory.

In this sense, Şanal’s batik practice represents not simply a technical continuity, but the reproduction of traditional knowledge within a contemporary artistic consciousness.

The practices of Agus Ismoyo and Nia Fliam also provide important points of reference for considering Şanal’s work within the context of contemporary batik. At the Brahma Tirta Sari studio in Yogyakarta, traditional Javanese batik methods are explored in conjunction with the possibilities of contemporary art. The National Gallery Singapore notes that one of the artists’ central aims is to expand the boundaries of traditional batik techniques and reach new forms of contemporary expression.

This approach has a direct conceptual affinity with Şanal’s practice: tradition is preserved while simultaneously being transformed.

Consequently, within contemporary batik art, tradition does not mean returning to the past. On the contrary, it means bringing a technique inherited from the past into confrontation with the artistic questions of the present.

Şanal’s position in Turkey can also be understood within this framework. His practice places technique, cultural transmission, and material at the forefront rather than political narrative.

This distinction is important because contemporary batik art does not have to follow a single conceptual direction. Some artists employ batik as a means of social critique; others investigate cultural memory; while others explore the technique’s own formal and material possibilities. Şanal’s practice is concentrated primarily within this third field: the plastic and cultural potential of the technique itself.

Dias Prabu, meanwhile, is one of the contemporary artists who expands the possibilities of batik by bringing the technique into dialogue with painting, drawing, murals, and installation. The artist combines hand-drawn batik with large-scale, site-specific installations.

This approach raises an important question concerning the future of batik art:

Does batik necessarily have to exist on fabric?

Prabu’s practice answers no.

Şanal’s work, by contrast, maintains a stronger relationship between the batik technique and fabric itself. Yet what both artists share is a refusal to regard batik merely as a means of producing decorative patterns.

When Şanal’s practice is considered alongside all of these examples, the concept of surface becomes central.

The batik surface is not a passive field upon which an image simply appears. The lines left by the wax, the movement of the dye, the layers, and the marks produced through scraping all make the history of the production process visible.

Fabric can therefore be understood as a kind of surface of memory.

Every mark becomes a trace of the process through which the work came into being.

A direct relationship can thus be established between batik and memory: wax establishes boundaries; dye records time; fabric preserves the process.

In this sense, Şanal’s batiks do not merely produce images; they also make the process of their own production visible.

Another important dimension of Şanal’s practice is the way it questions the historical distinction between craft and art.

Batik has long been regarded primarily as a “handicraft” or “textile craft.” Yet the practices of artists in Malaysia and Indonesia have demonstrated that the technique can also be understood within galleries and museums as an object of contemporary art.

The exhibition Love Me in My Batik in Malaysia historically examined how batik painting became positioned within the field of fine art from the 1950s onwards and how it subsequently entered into dialogue with contemporary art. The exhibition brought together the work of more than seventy artists.

Şanal’s practice can likewise be read as a Turkish counterpart to this historical transformation.

In his work, craft is not the opposite of art.

On the contrary, the handwork, repetition, patience, technical knowledge, and mastery of materials inherent in craft intersect with the conceptual production of contemporary art.

Perhaps the most significant conceptual conclusion to be drawn from Şanal’s practice is this:

Tradition survives only when it is reproduced anew.

If batik is preserved merely as a technique of the past, it risks becoming a museum object. When, however, an artist places that technique in relation to new forms, new surfaces, and new understandings of art, tradition remains alive.

In conclusion, when Erhan Şanal’s practice is considered within the history of contemporary batik, it would be inaccurate to regard him simply as a continuation of the Malaysian or Indonesian batik traditions. His work develops from within a different cultural geography—Turkey—and from the particular histories of Turkish art and textiles.

Şanal’s distinctive position within this international history lies in his contribution to making the wax-batik tradition visible once again in Turkey.

In Şanal’s work, batik ceases to be a decorative remnant of the past and becomes a field of relations between material, memory, labour, and contemporary aesthetics.

For this reason, describing his works simply as “batik paintings” would be insufficient.

More accurately, Şanal’s practice can be understood as a hybrid artistic practice in which traditional textile knowledge is reconstructed within the framework of contemporary art.

My relationship with art was not something that began suddenly; it was a process that naturally took shape over time as my interest developed. From childhood onwards, painting was not merely a hobby for me; it became a natural way of expressing myself. My painting journey began with the pictures I drew on the walls of the house where I lived during my childhood.

Over time, I realised how strong a need this was for me. By need, I mean that it was a means of transferring my imagination and thoughts outward in some way. My education in the Painting Department of the Faculty of Fine Arts at Anadolu University enabled me to transform this interest into a more conscious practice of production. There, I also came to understand more clearly that what I learned technically was not merely about visual representation, but also about thinking, questioning, and creating one’s own language.

What keeps me painting today is actually still the same fundamental need: to transform the things I want to say into a visual language. Sometimes a feeling, sometimes a body, sometimes a colour, or simply an image that forms in my mind drives me to create. Every work has been an ongoing process of discovery for me, through which I try to understand and express myself.

“I Don’t Know Who I Am Unless Someone Asks” 2026, Acrylic on canvas, 70×90 cm

2. When you think about how your relationship with art has changed over time, what difference do you see between where you are looking at your practice today and where you began? What encounters have been most important in transforming your perspective and the way you work?

My relationship with art has changed considerably over time, both technically and conceptually. When I first started, I mostly followed my instincts while painting, trying to directly transfer what I saw or imagined. Technically, as I developed myself in colour, light, composition, anatomy, surface, and material, my approach to painting also changed. At first, I tried to apply the techniques I learned correctly; today, I use technique in the service of the idea I want to express.

In terms of ideas, the biggest change for me was realising that painting is not simply about creating an image. In the early period, I thought more about “what can I draw?”, whereas today the questions “why am I doing this, and what does this image say to me?” are more decisive. Elements such as the figure, body, face, fabric, colour, and nature have, over time, ceased to be merely aesthetic elements for me and become a language that carries my thoughts.

When I look at my work today, I see that the excitement of painting I had at the beginning is still the same, but my perspective has become much more conscious. With the technical knowledge and experience I have gained over time, I am not simply trying to turn things into visuals; I am telling something. Technically I am freer, while conceptually I am at a more questioning point.

The most important thing that transformed my perspective and way of working during this process has been a richer form of expression that emerged from the combination of the art and artistic perspectives of other artists with the emotions I have within myself. Another important encounter was looking back at my own work over time. When I place my older works next to my current ones, I see that my artistic practice has changed along with me. I think what has transformed me most is continuing to learn, experiment, and question my own production.

“A Solitary Splendor” 2026, Acrylic on canvas, 50 × 50 cm 

3. We see a distinct language of the figure emerging in your paintings, one that has gradually become associated with your work. What were you seeking as you developed this language, and looking back today, how do you connect your initial search with your current practice?

The figurative language that has become distinct in my paintings over time was not something I decided on all at once. I began to see the figure not as a human body, but as a field of expression carrying emotions and thoughts. In particular, the posture of the body and the face being in the background, covered, or partially visible gradually became important means of expression for me.

Today, when creating a figure, I try to establish a balance between anatomical reality and my own interpretation. Colour, fabric, surface, and the figure’s position within the space also become parts of this language.

Looking back, I see a strong connection between my initial search and my current practice. What has changed is essentially that my way of looking at the figure has deepened. The figure I initially simply depicted has now become an area in which I think about visibility, identity, the body, and the ways in which people express themselves. In other words, I now consciously investigate the things I initially did intuitively and make them part of my own visual language.

Delal Tekin. From the artist’s archive.

4. The face is one of the most powerful elements used to identify a person in the history of painting. In your works, however, the visibility of the face changes in different ways. How did the decision to withdraw the face from the image emerge, and has this choice taken on new meanings for you over time?

The reason I remove the face from my figures is that I want every person to derive a different meaning when looking at the figure. Basically, I want to present the thought “I am also here among this crowd of people, you are here too, and so are they” without restricting identity or creating a character.

Adding a face to the figure creates a limitation for people who find, or will find, something of themselves in my art. If my works had visible faces, they might not become visible in the way I want; they could be perceived as ordinary portraits. What I want to bring to life here is precisely for people to find a piece of themselves. I achieved this through the method I use in my works.

“Blue Serenade” 2024, Acrylic on canvas, 60 × 80 cm

5. Alongside the figures, fabric, coverings, patterns, botanical forms, and colours also become elements that carry the narrative of your paintings. When creating a work, how do you establish the relationship between these elements? For you, is a painting the visual counterpart of a predetermined idea, or is it a process that finds its own direction during its making?

For me, none of these elements is merely an ornament or decorative element on its own. The figure, fabric, covering, pattern, botanical forms, and colour are parts of a whole that complement one another. In particular, fabric and covering hide the figure’s body while at the same time making it more visible. Colour is often one of the first things that determines the emotion and atmosphere of the work. Botanical forms and patterns support this atmosphere and make the space in which the figure exists more layered.

When I begin a work, I often have a feeling, an image, or a relationship between colours in my mind; however, I do not see the painting entirely as the visual equivalent of a predetermined idea. Of course, I can make changes depending on the inspiration and emotional state of the moment. Even if I set out with an idea, the painting can find its own direction during production. While creating the work, the figure’s posture and attitude within the composition can sometimes lead me to change the elements and colours I add.

“After Autumn” 2026, Acrylic on canvas, 40 × 40 cm 

6. Nature, and botanical forms in particular, appear repeatedly in your work. Does the relationship you establish with nature find its counterpart in your paintings primarily through form, colour, and texture, or is there another field of thought or emotion that you find reflected in nature itself?

There is a sentence I have used constantly before: “Nature is an endless source of inspiration for me.” Today, I transfer many things that exist in nature into my works, and I may add anything new that can be discovered in nature in the future; there is no limit to this for me. According to my wishes, I can also use an element that does not exist in nature but that I have been inspired by nature to create through my own imagination.

The counterpart of my relationship with nature in my imagination and paintings does not develop only through form, colour, and texture; the feelings and thoughts that nature leaves in me also have an important place. Therefore, rather than depicting nature exactly as it is, I use the traces it leaves in me within my own visual language. This is also why I sometimes use botanical forms around the figure, or as an element that covers or surrounds it. I want to create an encounter between the figure and nature.

Colour and texture also play an important role here. I am interested less in the colours I encounter in nature themselves than in the atmosphere they create. For me, nature is a source that nourishes my way of creating and the emotion of the painting.

“Someone Is Watching Us” 2026, Acrylic on canvas, 50 × 50 cm 

7. An artist’s visual world can be shaped not only by their own experiences, but also by the artists they look at and the works they encounter. Are there artists who have influenced your practice, inspired you, or led you to reconsider your work? Which names or artistic practices do you return to today?

Of course, there have been many artists and artistic practices that have influenced my work and made me rethink it. The way an artist uses material, approaches the figure, and looks at their own period and their own world is very nourishing for me.

I have always been particularly interested in the work of artists who focus on the figure and the body. Since my university years, I have been especially influenced by the use of light and shadow in Baroque art and by the treatment of fabrics, textures, and surfaces in the Rococo period. Although my own work does not formally resemble these periods, I draw nourishment from some of the expressive possibilities used by the masters of those periods.

For example, Caravaggio’s figures are works I have referred to and studied for a long time. In particular, the emergence of the figure from within the light, and the way light and shadow dramatically define the body, have been instructive for me. Rather than directly transferring these things into my own paintings, I am interested in how the methods they used might find a response within me. These encounters have opened up an important space for thought for me as I have developed my own figurative language and understanding of surface over time.

“I Made Everything Far Too Comfortable to Forget Myself” 2026, Acrylic on canvas, 60 × 90 cm 

8. During an art education, contact with art history, different approaches to art, and the work of other artists can be as formative as the technical knowledge acquired. Was there an encounter during your education that changed the way you thought, pushed you in another direction, or made you think, “I should try this in my own practice”?

There were many encounters during my education that pushed me in different directions. Getting to know different periods and artists more closely, especially in art history classes, changed my way of looking at painting considerably. Previously, I looked at a work more through the resulting image and technique; over time, I began to realise how the use of light, colour, composition, material, and even the artistic understanding of the period affected the idea of the work.

But the most important gain for me during my education was beginning to see artists not simply as “people to be taken as examples,” but as different ways of thinking. When I encounter an artist, alongside the question “How did they do this?”, I now also think, “Why did they do it this way, and what can I learn from this for my own practice?” I think this perspective has been one of the things that has contributed most to me while creating my own technique and visual language today.

“Memories That Resist the Passage of Time and Cannot Be Contained Anywhere”
2026, Oil on canvas, 60 × 60 cm 

9. The meaning an artist gives to a work and the meaning a viewer finds in it do not always have to be the same. How do you feel about your works becoming an independent story for the viewer? Could a viewer finding a meaning in a work that you never intended be part of the work’s completion for you?

When I give my own meaning to a work, of course I carry a starting point and an idea. But from the moment the work encounters the viewer, I think it no longer belongs only to me. Every viewer looks at the work through their own experience, memory, and emotions. Therefore, it is very valuable to me when a viewer finds a meaning that I had never thought of.

Sometimes listening to what a viewer sees in one of my works makes me look at that work again, because an unnoticed detail or a relationship I established while creating it may find a completely different response in another person. This shows that the work has created a life of its own.

I also think this is related to my withdrawing the face in my figures. Rather than telling a specific person or a single story, I want to leave a space where the viewer can place their own story. For this reason, I see the viewer finding a story independent of me in the work not as a deficiency, but rather as part of the work’s completion.

“Sacred Bearer” 2025, Acrylic on canvas, 60 × 80 cm

10. We see certain images, forms, or concerns recurring in your artistic practice over time. For an artist, repetition can mean not simply producing the same thing again, but looking at the same place from a different position each time. What do the recurring elements in your work tell you? Do you pursue them, or do they gradually carry you somewhere else?

The recurring figures, bodies, coverings, and botanical forms in my work do not actually mean repeating the same thing for me. On the contrary, I think some issues are still unfinished for me, and I continue to look at them again in different ways. Even when I use the same figure again, changes in its posture, the elements around it, its colours, its surface, or the form of the covering on it can create another meaning for me.

Sometimes I really do pursue them; an image forms in my mind and I continue to investigate it in different ways. Sometimes, during production, I realise that the same figure or the same issue is actually carrying me somewhere else. In particular, issues such as visibility, the body, identity, and the concealment of the face are not yet completed matters for me. I look at them from another perspective in every new work.

Therefore, I see repetition not as a cycle, but as a form of research. Although it may seem as if I am returning to the same place, I learn something different each time I return. Perhaps what changes over time is not the images, but the way I look at those images.

“The Manifestation of a Moment” 2026, Oil on canvas, 50 × 50 cm 

11. Finding one’s own language as an artist is important, but so is having the courage to transform that language. Is there anything in your current practice that you want to change, disrupt, or push beyond its boundaries? When you think about your future work, in what direction would you like to surprise yourself?

For me, developing does not mean completely rejecting what I have done before; it means being able to carry it to another point. In my future works, while preserving my own language so that the viewer can say, “this is definitely their work,” I also want to create a transformation that makes them say, “but we have never seen this from them before.” I think I would most like to surprise myself when I am able to exceed my own limits through my own works.

Yes, when I feel that I have established my own language, I am also afraid of becoming too comfortable within that language. Therefore, what I want to change or push the boundaries of in my work today is not to completely abandon the figurative language I have created, but to experiment with it in different ways.

In particular, I want to take the relationship between the fabric, covering, surface, and botanical forms I use alongside the figure further, and work with different materials and different surfaces. I also want to question more deeply the figure’s position on the canvas, its scale, and its relationship with space. Sometimes I want to step outside the composition I am accustomed to and create spaces in which I can surprise myself while producing.

When Tony Gatlif comes to mind, what emerges first is not a particular cinematic genre but a world of his own. Romani melodies, roads, borders, people on the move, crowded tables, streets and characters who never quite fit anywhere… In his films, these are not independent elements. They are all fragments of a world in which the feeling of belonging is constantly questioned.

At the heart of Gatlif’s cinema lies Romani culture. Yet his films do not simply observe this culture from the outside or reduce it to a folkloric image or an exotic narrative. In exploring Romani music, dance, everyday life and history, he pursues a broader question: How can a person exist beyond an identity assigned to them by others?

Born Michel Dahmani in Algeria on 10 September 1948, Gatlif was the son of a Kabyle father and a Romani mother. He spent his childhood in Algeria and moved to France at a young age. The violence, poverty, displacement and sense of foreignness he encountered in his early life would later become central concerns of his cinema.

Yet Gatlif’s story was never limited to his own past. Drawing on his experiences, he turned toward the world of those pushed to the margins of society, those forced beyond borders, and those living between belonging somewhere and belonging nowhere completely.

For this reason, the “other” in his films is not simply a concept describing a particular community. It is also a perspective that questions whom society leaves outside and from what distance people look at one another.

Gatlif did not treat Roma, migrants, exiles and displaced people merely as characters to be represented. He also carried the rhythm, sound and everyday life of their worlds into the form of his cinema. The movement of his camera, following the rhythm of streets and bodies, is part of this approach. In his films, the camera rarely observes characters from a distance; it moves with them and participates in the life surrounding them.

And then there is music…

In Gatlif’s cinema, music is not simply a soundtrack standing behind the image. Romani melodies, flamenco, rebetiko and the sounds of North Africa become direct parts of the story. At times, music carries emotions that characters cannot express; at others, it makes the memory of a community visible. When words are insufficient, music moves to the forefront of the narrative.

Yet the central role of music is also one of the most debated aspects of Gatlif’s cinema. His use of music, dance and movement to make Romani culture visible brings its memory and voice to the centre of cinema; on the other hand, it has also been criticised for potentially softening experiences such as poverty, discrimination, migration and exclusion within an aesthetic atmosphere. When pain is made beautiful through music and dance, the audience may perceive the reality before them not as it is, but as a romantic or exotic experience.

From this perspective, Gatlif’s cinema exists on a fine line between making the other visible and exoticising them. His attempt to portray Romani life through its own cultural elements can be read as an effort to move beyond viewing Roma simply as a community observed from the outside. Yet this world is ultimately still seen through the director’s camera. His films therefore make Romani stories visible while also raising the question of whose perspective shapes those stories.

This tension becomes particularly clear in his use of music. For Gatlif, music is not a background element but a narrative form in its own right, carrying the memory of characters and communities. For this reason, the fact that music sometimes takes precedence over cinematic narration cannot simply be considered a weakness; it can also be read as a deliberate aesthetic choice. Yet this choice leaves open the question of when music remains the voice of a culture and when it becomes an aesthetic spectacle for the audience.

The 1993 film Latcho Drom is one of the strongest examples of this cinematic approach. The film traces the cultural journey of the Roma from India to Europe through music, dance and images rather than dialogue. Geographies change, languages and faces change; yet cultural memory continues its journey through music.

This is also where a fundamental distinction in Gatlif’s approach to Romani culture emerges. He attempts to portray Roma not simply as an “other” observed from the outside, but as part of a living culture with its own memory, language, music and everyday life. Yet this approach does not completely eliminate the possibility of exoticisation. On the contrary, it makes the question of when making a culture visible can turn it into an aesthetic object even more important.

One of the strongest examples of this approach is the 1997 film Gadjo Dilo. Through the story of a young French man who arrives in a Romani community in Romania, the film explores foreignness, cultural distance and encounter. The “gadjo” at the centre of the film, meaning a non-Romani outsider, tries to understand a community while also confronting his own prejudices.

Here, Gatlif does not simply tell the story of a community. He also questions the audience’s gaze. The person attempting to understand the other is eventually forced to recognise their own position and prejudices. Yet questioning the audience’s gaze also requires questioning the director’s own gaze. Approaching another culture does not make the camera of the person representing it invisible.

Vengo, released in 2000, is one of the films in which the director turns toward the world of Andalusia and flamenco. Bringing death, mourning, family and revenge together with music and dance, the film does not use flamenco merely as a cultural spectacle. The movement of the body becomes an expression of emotions suppressed by the characters.

Exils, released in 2004, is one of the films more directly connected to Gatlif’s own past. The story of two young people travelling from Paris to Algeria explores the idea of return. Yet this return is not simply a desire to go home. Sometimes a person moves toward a feeling of belonging not to the place where they were born, but to a past they have never known.

Throughout this journey, Gatlif’s camera follows not only geography but memory. Exploring the relationship between identity and place of birth, Exils earned the director the Best Director Award at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival.

Gatlif’s cinema looks not only at the people of today but also at those whose stories have not been sufficiently told by history.

His 2009 film Liberté tells the story of Roma subjected to Nazi persecution during the Second World War. The film focuses on a part of European history that remained insufficiently visible for a long time and places the persecution of Roma within historical memory. Here, Gatlif uses cinema not only as a form of storytelling but also as a space for making forgotten or marginalised stories visible again.

Yet making historical pain visible is only one part of the issue; how that pain is represented is equally important. Aestheticising suffering can bring it closer to the audience, but it can also soften the harshness of the reality itself. One of the tensions within Gatlif’s cinema emerges precisely here: at the boundary between making suffering visible and making it beautiful.

Djam, released in 2017, moves Gatlif’s world from Greece to Istanbul. Accompanied by rebetiko, the film intertwines the sea, cities and roads with feelings of loss, freedom and solidarity. Istanbul becomes not so much a final destination as a space where different cultures come into contact.

Because in Gatlif’s films, the road is not merely a form of geographical movement. As characters travel from one place to another, they carry their pasts with them. Journeying is therefore both a geographical and a personal experience in his cinema.

Leaving a place does not mean escaping the past. On the contrary, it often brings a person face to face with that past once again.

Tony Gatlif died at the age of 77 while working on a historical film project in Arles, following a health problem. He left behind a long cinematic career stretching from 1975 to 2025 and a filmography of 25 feature films. His final film, Ange, was released in 2025.

Yet remembering Gatlif only as a director who portrayed Roma would narrow the scope of his cinema. He began with Romani culture, but his deeper concern was the right of a person to define themselves.

Who decides who a person is?

States? Borders? Documents? Places of birth?

Gatlif’s films do not offer a single answer to these questions. Instead, they suggest that identity is not a fixed and unchanging definition. Memory, language, music, the body, the past and personal experience are also parts of the way a person constructs themselves.

There are borders in his cinema, but borders are never the final word.

Maps can divide countries. Documents can classify identities. Societies can create distinctions between “us” and “them”. Gatlif places music, movement and human stories against all these divisions. Yet music and movement are not neutral either; they too pass through a particular gaze.

Perhaps this contradiction is precisely what makes his cinema lasting. Gatlif does not try to erase differences; he makes them visible. Yet the act of making something visible is itself open to debate. Telling the story of a culture does not necessarily mean understanding it; representing suffering aesthetically does not always convey the full weight of that suffering to the audience.

From Romani melodies to flamenco, from rebetiko to the sounds of North Africa, his cinema portrays cultures not as isolated worlds but as lives that come into contact with and transform one another. In this sense, Gatlif’s cinema opens a powerful space for imagining different forms of coexistence. At the same time, it forces us to consider who represents these differences, how they are represented and through which aesthetic tools.

What remains after Tony Gatlif is not only the work of one of the strong representatives of Romani culture in cinema. What remains is also a powerful cinematic language built around identity, migration, belonging and borders, carried by music and movement.

In his cinema, what matters is not only where the journey leads, but what is remembered along the way and how that journey is seen.

Hope consists of expectations greater than zero regarding the fulfilment of a future goal (Rideout and Montemuro, 1986). Its most important characteristic is the belief that there is a way out and that, with help, changes can occur in an individual’s existence.

Despair, on the other hand, is defined as negative expectations, below zero, regarding the fulfilment of a goal. Both hope and despair are possible reflections of a person’s chances of attaining their actual goals in the future (Melges, 1969). Hope and despair represent opposing expectations.

While hope involves the anticipation that the plans put into action to achieve a goal will succeed, despair involves a judgement of failure. These two opposing expectations vary from person to person and from situation to situation, depending on when and how the expected outcome is expected to occur.

Each of these plans and expectations affects not only how an individual fits their plans to their goal, but also the form of the goal they establish for themselves. The individual processes this way of thinking through the following stages (Melges, 1969).

Ability versus chance: An individual may achieve their goals through ability or through chance. People who believe that their future depends on chance are less inclined toward goal-oriented behaviour. Moreover, a person’s belief that their plans are ineffective creates a sense of inadequacy. Belief in the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of action, together with a person’s self-respect and belief in their own ability, is a key factor in determining feelings of despair.

Trust versus distrust: The trust one feels toward others plays an important role in the development of hope. When considered in terms of dependence on others, the intensity of a person’s distrust toward other people limits their goals. When an action undertaken together with others ends in failure, a person who lacks a sense of trust tends to hold others responsible. A person with a developed sense of trust, however, accepts partial responsibility for an unsuccessful outcome.

For this reason, a distrustful person tends to prefer short-term goals rather than long-term ones.

Long-term versus short-term: Hope determines goals that can be achieved in the short term, the long term, or both. The extension of time may begin to coincide with despair. Thus, even if a person waits for the outcome in a fatalistic manner, they continue to make an effort toward short-term goals.

In summary, the interaction between ability and chance on the path toward achieving a goal, one’s sense of trust in others, one’s belief in the effort required to achieve short-term goals in comparison with persistent and long-term goals, and the interaction among these beliefs largely determine the forms of hope or despair experienced by an individual.

WHO IS INGMAR BERGMAN?

Ingmar Bergman was born on 14 July 1918 in Uppsala, Sweden, the son of Erik Bergman, a Lutheran minister who later became chaplain to the King of Sweden, and Karin (née Åkerblom), a nurse who was also of Walloon descent.

The Bergman family came from Järvsö in Gävleborg. Bergman’s paternal grandfather worked as a pharmacist in Stockholm, while his great-great-grandfather Henrik Bergman worked as an assistant pastor and married Erika Augusta Agrell, the daughter of pastor Erik Agrell, and Elsa Margareta Hermanni, the daughter of chief accountant Hieronymus Emanuel Hermanni, as well as Anna Katarina Neostadia. The Hermanni family were merchants in Stockholm, while Hieronymus’s father, Simon Daniel, was a wholesaler like his grandfather.

Through Elsa Margareta Hermanni, Bergman was descended from the Swedish noble families Bröms, Stockenström and Ehrensköld, as well as clerical families of Swedish and Swedish-Finnish origin and urban families of Swedish and German origin. Through his paternal grandmother, Anna Katarina Eneroth, Bergman was descended from German noble families. The Flach and de Frese families had been introduced into the Swedish Riddarhuset.

Anna Katarina Eneroth was the cousin of Johan Åkerblom, Bergman’s maternal grandfather, who worked as a traffic director. Thus, Bergman’s parents were second cousins. His maternal grandmother, Anna Calwagen, was the daughter of the German and English lecturer Ernst Gottfrid Calwagen and his wife Charlotta Margareta Carlsberg. The ancestor of the Calwagen family, the merchant Paul Calwagen, had migrated from the Netherlands to Karlshamn, Sweden, in the seventeenth century.

Paul’s wife, Maria van der Hagen, of Dutch-Swedish descent, was descended from the Dutch-Swedish court painter Laurens van der Plas. Through Ernst Gottfrid, Bergman was descended from the noble families Tigerschiöld and Weinholz, as well as the Bure family.

WHAT IS DESPAIR ACCORDING TO INGMAR BERGMAN?

“I came out of the cinema reeling as if drunk, in a state as though I were speechless from drugs, while the film pumped through my bloodstream at a rapid pace.” Gunnel Lindblom, the star of The Silence, described her first experience in a Bergman film in 1949.

Ingmar Bergman’s mature cinema creates an intimate interaction with the viewer in which a series of disturbing emotions emerge and are shared, often taking place face to face. Bergman’s groundbreaking 1966 film Persona provides an example of such an encounter. The film’s original title was Cinematographe, the Swedish term for cinematography.

Yet both names are appropriate for a work that questions cinema and the subject through an effective but disturbing ontological collapse. This can perhaps be seen most clearly in Bergman’s extraordinary use of close-ups, which Gilles Deleuze described as forcing the human face into an encounter with emptiness.

The relentless close-up of the face is a formal and thematic key to Bergman’s work. In these frequent, almost embarrassingly intimate and fully extended moments, the viewer can see, contemplate and feel existential securities in various states of crisis, while watching the faces before us reduced to bare flesh, bone, mouth, nose, hair and eyes.

This finely focused dissection forces us to confront both the mysterious materiality of the face and its role as the communicative nerve centre of an individual’s investment in subjectivity. The camera moves anxiously, almost as if attempting to enter, until the enormous, isolated face fills the frame and brings the zoom to a halt.

As we watch our enormous diegetic companion ask what it is that they are, confronting a personal void, the viewer encounters a vast human world that is at once close and alienating.

Here, a doubled gaze takes place: the self-consciousness of the subject on screen as it confronts crisis meets the viewer’s gaze, incorporated into and participating in the image. Both the face and the viewer seem to experience the intensity of the gaze as diegetic and metadiegetic perspectives intermingle and fragment.

This is reinforced by Bergman’s frequent use of the 1.33:1 frame, which excludes any clear view of the world beyond the face, leaving it with no obvious direction—up, down, left or right—in which to direct its gaze.

The face trapped within the relentless close-up seems to search beyond the dimensions of the frame, opening a black-hole-like space immune to cinematic existence. Enclosed on all four sides, the face looks toward a direction not confined by the graphic dimensions of the screen, toward a space that is something far greater than a black hole.

In this final movement, in which the enormous face looks directly out of the screen and visually explores a world beyond the world in which it conventionally exists, the field of the diegetic subject becomes connected to my own.

(Here I am, sitting in this disturbingly intimate experience, disturbed by it and yet simultaneously exhilarated.)

THE PLOT OF PERSONA

Persona is a 1966 Swedish psychological drama film written and directed by Ingmar Bergman and starring Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann. The story revolves around Alma (Andersson), a young nurse, and her patient, the celebrated theatre actress Elisabet Vogler (Ullmann), who suddenly stops speaking. They move to a cottage where Alma begins to look after Elisabet, trust her, and gradually finds it difficult to distinguish herself from her patient.

Characterised by elements of psychological horror, Persona has been the subject of extensive critical analysis, interpretation and debate. The film’s exploration of duality, madness and personal identity has been understood as reflecting Jung’s theory of personality, while the filmmaking has been interpreted in relation to vampirism, homosexuality, motherhood, abortion and other themes. Its experimental prologue and narrative style have also attracted considerable attention.

The enigmatic film has been called the Everest of cinematic analysis. According to film historian Peter Cowie, “Everything said about Persona can be challenged; the opposite can also be true.”

Bergman developed Persona together with Ullmann and Andersson around the idea of its protagonists and their exploration of identity. The film was shot in Stockholm and Fårö in 1965. During production, the filmmakers experimented with effects involving smoke and mirrors to frame a scene and, in post-production, combined the faces of the principal characters for a single shot. Andersson defended an explicit monologue in the script and rewrote parts of it.

When Persona was first released, it was edited because of its controversial subject matter. It received positive reviews, and the term Person(a)kult was coined by the Swedish press to describe its enthusiastic followers. The film won Best Film at the 4th Guldbagge Awards and was nominated by Sweden for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. The censored material was restored in 2001.

Many critics consider Persona one of the greatest films ever made. It ranked fifth in Sight & Sound’s 1972 poll and seventeenth in the 2012 poll. It has also influenced subsequent directors, including Robert Altman and David Lynch.

ANALYSIS OF PERSONA

The title Persona reflects the Latin word for “mask” and Carl Jung’s theory of the persona, an external identity distinct from the psyche. Jung believed that people project public images in order to protect themselves and may come to identify with those personalities.

An interviewer asked Bergman about the Jungian implications of the film’s title. Bergman accepted the alternative interpretation that it referred to the masks worn by actors in ancient drama, while also acknowledging that Jung’s concept corresponded to the film “admirably.” Bergman agreed that Jung’s theory “fit the situation well.”

Elisabet is a theatre actress and is seen in “mask-like makeup,” which, according to Singer, points toward a “theatrical personality.” Singer notes that Elisabet wears “thick and artificial eyelashes” even when she is not performing.

Egil Törnqvist observed that, while performing as Electra, Elisabet turns her eyes away from the theatre audience and breaks the fourth wall by looking directly into the camera. According to Törnqvist, she makes a fist, symbolising her rebellion against the concept of meaningful performance. Singer concludes that although Elisabet develops a deeply personal relationship with Alma, she cannot escape her identity as an actress and is ultimately left alone with the “desperate dream of being.”

The photograph of Thích Quảng Đức setting himself on fire, as described by Carsten Jensen, was identified by journalist Malcolm Browne as being connected to the themes of Persona.

According to Singer, Bergman confronts his audience with “the nature of the art form.” Literary critic Maria Bergom-Larsson wrote that Persona reflects Bergman’s approach to filmmaking.

Although Alma initially believes that artists are “created out of compassion, out of the need to help,” she sees Elisabet laughing at performances on a radio programme and realises that she herself has become the subject of the actress’s work. She rejects her earlier belief: “How foolish I am.” While Elisabet examines Alma, Bergman examines them both.

Michaels wrote that Bergman and Elisabet share a dilemma: neither can respond authentically to “great catastrophes” such as the Holocaust or the Vietnam War. Political columnist Carsten Jensen identified the images Elisabet sees from Vietnam as those of Thích Quảng Đức setting himself on fire in 1963.

According to Jensen, photographs of Quảng Đức’s death were widely circulated and were used in Persona. Scholar Benton Meadows wrote that Elisabet sees herself in Quảng Đức’s death and fears that this will be the consequence of her silent rebellion.

Törnqvist wrote that Elisabet was affected by the fact that the monk was a genuine rebel, while her own rebellion amounted to a cowardly retreat behind a silent persona.

Coates also associated masks with the themes of identity and duality: “The mask is Janus-faced.” Alma’s secret emerges in the sex-party monologue, which critic Robin Wood connected to a combination of shame and nostalgia, perhaps indicating the character’s sexual disintegration. According to Wood, the incident touches upon infidelity and childhood sexuality.

Arnold Weinstein wrote that Alma’s story provides the harshest example of the “cracks” in the character’s mask. She believes in her identity as a nurse, ultimately leading to the “collapse of the self.” The monologue is so intense that it approaches pornography.

Film historian P. Adams Sitney summarised the story’s trajectory as a psychoanalytic process: a referral, followed by an initial interview, explanations and the discovery of the patient’s fundamental problem. According to Sitney, the story initially appears to begin from Alma’s point of view; after Elisabet compares their hands, however, her perspective emerges as the source of the story.

Another possible reference to psychology is the play Elisabet performs when she becomes mute: Electra by Sophocles or Euripides. According to Bergman, he did not focus on Greek tragedy in his work, but the character of Electra inspired the idea of the Electra complex. Bergman felt that his choice of the play was connected to “sexual identities,” a key concept in psychoanalysis.

The theme of gender also fits Bergman’s recurring motif of “fighting women,” previously seen in The Silence and later in Cries and Whispers and Autumn Sonata. According to Professor Marilyn Johns Blackwell, Elisabet’s resistance to speaking can be interpreted as a resistance to gender roles. By portraying this tension primarily through women, Bergman can be said to “problematise the position of woman as the other”; the role imposed on women by society is “essentially alien to their subjecthood.”

Blackwell also wrote that the attraction between Elisabet and Alma, together with the absence of male sexuality, is consistent with their identification with one another and creates a doubling that reveals a “multiple, fluid, self-contradictory identity”—a concept of identity that undermines male ideology.

The theme of merging and doubling surfaces early in the film when Alma says that she has watched one of Elisabet’s films and is disturbed by the thought that they resemble one another. Blackwell also suggests that one of the film’s original titles, A Piece of Cinematography, may imply the nature of representation.

She also draws attention to the film’s fabricated tones. Alison Darren describes Alma and Elisabet’s relationship as existing “somewhere between love and hate” and profiles Persona in The Lesbian Film Guide, suggesting that, “although it may easily be an illusion,” the two women may approach having sex in one scene. Viewing the scene in which Elisabet enters Alma’s room as seductive, she interprets the film in feminist terms as a depiction of lesbianism.

Professor Alexis Luko felt that the characters’ touches and similarities on screen symbolise the merging of their personalities while also conveying intimacy and eroticism.

Foster believed that Elisabet’s gaze leads her to question Alma about her engagement to Karl-Henrik. According to Foster, sexual encounters between men and women are associated with abortion, while lesbian love increasingly becomes associated with a shared identity.

However, if Persona dramatizes a lesbian relationship, this is clearly not presented in a positive light, as it later becomes characterized by narcissism and violence. If lesbianism is regarded as a stronger version of female friendship or maternal love, Alma and Elisabet’s relationship takes the place of the depiction of the Oedipus complex in the prologue, in which the male child reaches out in vain toward his mother. According to Jeremi Szaniawski, the homoeroticism (gay and lesbian) in Bergman’s Persona, Hour of the Wolf, Cries and Whispers, and Face to Face constituted a rebellion against the strict upbringing imposed by Bergman’s father, Erik Bergman, a minister of the Church of Sweden.

Born in 1929 in Matsumoto, Japan, Kusama’s relationship with art began in childhood. Although she grew up in an environment that did not support her wish to become an artist, she continued to draw and paint. The intense visual experiences she had as a child became an important source for the ideas of repetition and multiplication that would shape her later work. Her experiences of seeing objects, flowers and surfaces multiply would eventually reappear in her art as dots, nets and repeated forms.

Yet Kusama’s art cannot be explained simply through her psychological experiences. What she did was not merely reproduce what she experienced, but transform those experiences into an artistic language. Fear, obsession, repetition and anxieties surrounding the dissolution of the self gradually became part of a formal and conceptual investigation. For this reason, Kusama’s dots are not simply decorative elements, nor are her nets merely repeated patterns. Each repetition carries the idea of the individual crossing its boundaries and merging into a larger whole.

Her move to America in 1957 marked a new period in her artistic life. When she settled in New York, she did not find an art world ready to accept her. She faced financial difficulties and tried to establish herself in an environment dominated by male artists. Yet she did not retreat from her practice. Moving beyond painting, she turned to sculpture, performance and installation, questioning the idea that art had to exist only on canvas.

The struggle Kusama faced was not simply a struggle to be recognised as an artist. It was also an attempt to make her voice heard as a woman artist within a male-dominated art world. Female artists had far less visibility in the art world of the 1960s than they do today. Rather than accepting the limited space offered to her, Kusama sought to expand the boundaries of art. She used her body, entered public space, criticised the art market and challenged the position of the viewer as a passive observer.

Her performances of the 1960s are important in this respect. In works where bodies were covered with polka dots, she confronted nudity, sexuality, war and social conventions. The dots made the body visible while simultaneously making its individual boundaries less distinct. For Kusama, the body was not simply an object to be represented; it became the material of the artwork itself.

This approach also helps explain her place within avant-garde art. To be avant-garde does not simply mean producing unusual or unconventional works. It means questioning established assumptions about what art is, where it can take place, what materials it can use and how the viewer can relate to it. Kusama’s practice clearly embodies this questioning. Her movement from canvas towards objects, the body and space; her incorporation of performance and installation; and her challenge to the boundary between art and everyday life placed her among the important experimental artists of her time.

There was another dimension to Kusama’s struggle with the art world. She repeatedly spoke about her ideas not receiving sufficient recognition and about male artists gaining greater visibility with similar ideas. For this reason, her New York years should not be understood simply as the rise of a successful artist. They were also the struggle of a woman artist to have her ideas and work recognised as her own.

Her 1966 work Narcissus Garden is a striking example of this relationship with the art market. The installation of mirrored spheres confronted viewers with their own reflections while also questioning the economic value of the artwork. By offering the spheres for sale, Kusama made an ironic intervention into the way the art market transforms an aesthetic object into a commercial product. She was not simply making an artwork; she was also making the system in which she worked part of her subject.

The Infinity Nets paintings she developed during the same period show how systematically Kusama transformed repetition into an artistic language. Covered with small, continuously repeated nets, the surfaces have no clear centre. The eye struggles to find a beginning or an end. As a single form continues to multiply, the importance of the individual element diminishes and the entire surface becomes a unified system.

Kusama did not merely represent infinity; she turned it into a method of making.

This idea was later transferred into space through her mirror rooms. In the Infinity Mirror Rooms, the viewer is no longer simply an eye standing before the artwork, but a body entering it. Mirrors, lights and repeated forms make the boundaries of space uncertain. Seeing their own image multiplied seemingly without end, viewers are also encouraged to question where the boundaries of their own bodies begin and end.

These works are not disconnected from Kusama’s earlier practice. In the Infinity Nets paintings, repetition destabilises the boundaries of the surface; in the mirror rooms, it destabilises the boundaries of space. In one, infinity is constructed across a surface; in the other, it becomes a physical experience for the viewer.

Pumpkins are another important part of this visual world. The pumpkin form, which had interested Kusama since childhood, developed over the years into sculptures and installations of different scales. The yellow surfaces covered with black dots eventually became one of the artist’s most recognisable images. Yet the importance of the pumpkins goes beyond their popularity. The transformation of an object rooted in personal memory into part of a broader visual system through repetition and multiplication reveals Kusama’s ability to turn the personal into a universal visual language.

After returning to Japan in 1973, Kusama’s life entered another period. Because of ongoing psychological difficulties, she began living at a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo. This did not mark the end of her artistic life. While continuing to live at the hospital, she kept working in her nearby studio, painting, writing and producing new work.

It would be misleading to describe this period of Kusama’s life only as a story of illness. Her psychological experiences undoubtedly influenced the formation of her art, but to see her work merely as their product would overlook her agency and intellectual labour as an artist. Rather than simply translating her experiences directly into artworks, Kusama continually reworked them through repetition, multiplication, the body and infinity.

Perhaps the greatest strength of her art lies precisely here: she did not leave the personal as something belonging only to herself.

Kusama’s late international recognition is significant for the same reason. An artist who had once remained insufficiently visible at the centre of the art world eventually became one of the best-known figures in contemporary art. Her mirror rooms, in particular, reached millions of people through major exhibitions and museums around the world. Forms of production that might once have been regarded as experimental or marginal are now among the most widely experienced forms of contemporary art.

This transformation also shows why Kusama’s art should not be judged solely through popularity. Her achievement lies less in creating recognisable images than in maintaining and deepening her own artistic language over decades. Dots, nets, mirrors and pumpkins are not disconnected symbols; they are different expressions of the same underlying conceptual world.

With Yayoi Kusama’s death at the age of 97 in 2026, a long artistic life came to an end. She left behind not only a recognisable visual world of dots, mirrors and pumpkins, but an original artistic language bringing together painting, sculpture, performance and installation. By transforming personal experiences through repetition, the body, selfhood and infinity, Kusama also carved out her own place within a male-dominated art world. Her legacy lives on not only in the iconic images she left behind, but in her insistence on transforming personal experience into a universal artistic language and on sustaining her art on her own terms.

Who Does the Night Belong To?

A reading of modern urban life, loneliness, and visibility through Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks.

A painting’s resistance to time cannot be explained solely by its aesthetic power. Some works move beyond the period in which they were created and become open spaces in which each generation can find a meaning of its own. Edward Hopper’s 1942 painting Nighthawks is one of these works.

For years, this painting has been called “the picture of loneliness,” but it is actually concerned with a much more complex question: Does being together really mean being with one another?

The four figures Hopper brings together in a diner open at night do not appear physically far apart. Yet as we look more closely, what becomes apparent is not the physical distance between them, but their emotional disconnection. No one speaks. No one hurries. Time seems to have stopped for a few minutes.

Edward Hopper, 1942, Nighthawks, oil on canvas.

Perhaps this is why Nighthawks reminds us less of America in the 1940s than of today’s cities. Modern urban life does not eliminate loneliness despite its crowds; it makes loneliness invisible.

Detail, Edward Hopper, Nighthawks, 1942, oil on canvas.

One of the painting’s strongest elements is not the figures but the glass. The broad glass surface surrounding the diner makes the interior completely visible. Yet at the same time, it makes the space inaccessible. The viewer is a witness to the scene, but not a part of it. Hopper does not allow us to identify with the people inside; he leaves us outside.

Detail, Edward Hopper, Nighthawks, 1942, oil on canvas.

Does our relationship with screens today produce a similar distance? We constantly see each other’s lives. But are we really witnessing one another? For precisely this reason, Nighthawks can be read not only as an important image in art history, but also as an important image of the digital age.

Nothing dramatic happens in Hopper’s painting. There is no murder, no fight, no clearly defined story. And yet the painting manages to hold the viewer before it for a long time. Because instead of giving an answer, it produces questions.

Detail, Edward Hopper, Nighthawks, 1942, oil on canvas.

Who are these people? Why are they here? Do they know one another? Or are they strangers sharing the same loneliness? Uncertainty becomes the work’s fundamental narrative device.

While much contemporary imagery of urban life is built around movement and speed, Hopper suggests the opposite. Silence can also be part of the narrative.

Perhaps this is why Nighthawks still looks so contemporary. The world has changed. Cities have grown. The night has become brighter than ever. Yet the invisible distances between people have not disappeared. Hopper’s painting does not belong only to the past. It belongs to a scene that is reproduced every night.

Nighthawks is one of the most reinterpreted works in art history. From David Lynch’s cinema to the photographs of Gregory Crewdson, from Banksy’s interventions to advertising and popular culture, the visual language of this painting has been reproduced across many fields. This is due not only to its aesthetic achievement, but also to its ability to construct a universal narrative about the loneliness of modern people.

Even today, Hopper’s painting remains a powerful point of reference for artists who want to explore urban life, waiting, and invisible distances.

Zamansız Note

“Good art does not represent time; it transcends it. Hopper’s Nighthawks has continued to ask the same question for more than seventy years: Do we really see one another within the crowd?”

Beyond the Photograph: A Way of Looking

Some photographs do not simply show a place; they make us feel what once happened there. In the surface of a wall, the texture of a stone, a figure waiting by the shore, or an object left within an empty space, there is something beyond the image itself. Photography here does not merely record what is visible; it follows the trace of what remains unseen.

Gunes Kaplan’s photographic practice occupies precisely this threshold. At first glance, her work may appear to be an observation of place, people and everyday life. Yet, on closer examination, its central concern is less representation than tracing. Rather than explaining memory, lived experience, belonging and time directly, Kaplan transforms the traces these experiences leave upon places and bodies into a photographic language.

Kaplan’s BA in Sociology from Anadolu University is significant to this way of seeing. Yet it would be limiting to understand her practice solely through a sociological approach to photography. Her work combines documentary observation with a poetic and intuitive visual language. Relationships between people, society and place are not explained; they are suggested within the image.

This is consistent with Kaplan’s own artist statement, which describes photography as a way of investigating the emotional, social and psychological layers embedded in landscapes, architecture and everyday environments. Her practice moves between observation and interpretation, allowing ambiguity and multiple readings rather than fixed meanings.

For this reason, the first question to ask when looking at Kaplan’s photographs is perhaps not “What does this photograph show?” but rather, “What trace does this photograph carry?”

Hands Blending into Blue, 2011 — Photography

The Memory of Place

One of the most distinctive aspects of Kaplan’s practice is the transformation of place from passive background into an active carrier of experience. Landscape, architecture and everyday environments become vessels of lived experience.

This approach becomes particularly visible in The Stone Remember I and The Stone Remember II. Stone and architectural surfaces are not simply fragments of physical reality. They are surfaces marked by time, touched by people and carrying traces of the past.

“Can stone remember?” may initially seem like a poetic question, but within Kaplan’s practice it carries something more. Memory is no longer understood as belonging solely to the human mind. The traces left by lived experience in places, the transformation of spaces over time, and what people leave behind become fragments of a collective memory.

At this point, Kaplan’s photography can be read as a kind of archaeology of memory. The artist does not reconstruct the past; she searches for the traces of the past that remain in the present.

Perhaps this is where the central concern of Kaplan’s photography emerges: not finding ways to show the past, but finding ways to make visible the trace that the past leaves upon the present.

The Stone Remember I, 2013 — Photography

Where Does the Human Begin, and Where Does Place End?

Kaplan’s approach to the human figure is inseparable from this understanding of place. In her photographs, the human figure rarely appears as an isolated subject. The body is read together with its surroundings. At times it appears beneath a burden, at times waiting, and at times as a small figure within a larger environment.

The Stone Remember I makes this relationship especially visible. The seated figure is almost absorbed by the architecture. Rather than becoming the dominant subject, the person is held within a structure whose scale, material and history exceed the individual.

Traces of Burden is particularly striking in another respect. The “burden” is not simply a physical object being carried. A tension emerges between the weight carried by the body and the weight imposed upon it by lived experience.

The Waiting I creates another temporal condition. Waiting is not simply a short interval before an event; it becomes a state of existence in its own right. The viewer does not know what the figure is waiting for. We are not given its past, its future, or its complete story.

This absence matters. By withholding the figure’s biography, Kaplan creates space for the viewer to place their own experience within the image. When the figure’s story remains incomplete, the viewer’s story can begin.

Yet a critical tension also emerges here: the withdrawal of context gives the photograph a universal openness, while at the same time risking the obscuring of the specific social and geographical reality from which the image emerges. Kaplan’s poetic language is strong; its most important test, however, is whether it can remain poetic without allowing poetry to replace context.

Shutter, 2018 — Photography

The Human Within the Everyday

Shutter offers a different register of Kaplan’s relationship to the human figure. The two children are not presented as symbols detached from ordinary life; they remain within the texture of an everyday urban setting. The photograph’s directness creates a productive contrast with Kaplan’s more contemplative images.

This contrast is important because it prevents the practice from being reduced to a single aesthetic of silence. Kaplan’s attention to human presence can move from stillness and distance toward gesture, encounter and everyday activity, while retaining an interest in how people are shaped by the spaces they occupy.

Traces of Burden, 2018 — Photography

The Aesthetics of Silence

A significant number of Kaplan’s photographs are not loud images. Rather than dramatic events, they carry a sense of silence, waiting, distance and emptiness. This is one of the central characteristics of her photographic approach.

Kaplan does not explain the image so much as invite the viewer to remain with it. Its meaning is not completed at first glance. A structure becomes more than a structure; it can evoke abandonment, time or loss. A body becomes more than a body; it can carry waiting, solitude or transition.

The empty spaces within Kaplan’s photographs are particularly important. Emptiness is not simply unused space within the composition. It becomes a space into which the viewer can place their own thoughts.

Silence, therefore, is not an absence in Kaplan’s photographs; it is a method of narration.

Yet another question emerges here: “Does an image say more when it says less?” Kaplan’s practice does not offer a definitive answer. In some works, ambiguity strengthens the poetic power of the image, while in others there is a sense that greater contextual grounding might deepen the reading. This tension is one of the elements that makes the practice compelling.

Untitled (2022), 2022 — Photography

Architecture, Social Space and the Trace of Presence

The 2022 Untitled photograph extends Kaplan’s investigation of place into a more explicitly architectural field. The worn façade, barred windows and small human figure create a layered relationship between interior and exterior, visibility and separation.

Here, architecture is not merely scenery. Its damaged surfaces and openings suggest accumulated time, while the figure’s position makes the building feel inhabited yet distant. The photograph can therefore be read as an inquiry into how social experience becomes embedded in material space.

This work also complicates the idea of emptiness. The façade is full of signs—windows, bars, cracks, surfaces and traces—yet the scene remains psychologically quiet. What is absent becomes as important as what is visible.

Echoes of the Shore I, 2023 — Photography

The Shore Is Not a Landscape, but a Threshold

With Echoes of the Shore I and Echoes of the Shore II, the shore becomes an important visual and conceptual space within Kaplan’s practice.

A shore exists between two things: land and water, staying and leaving, the familiar and the unknown, the past and the future. For this reason, Kaplan’s images of the shore cannot be understood simply as landscape photography. The relationship between horizon, water and human figure transforms the image into a psychological space.

The human figure is not presented as an agent who dominates the environment. The figure is positioned as a small presence within it. This difference in scale makes the relationship between the individual and the world visible.

The shore therefore carries one of the central concepts in Kaplan’s practice: the idea of the threshold. The feelings of waiting, transition and uncertainty that recur throughout her photographs converge here within a single spatial image.

The Waiting I, 2024 — Photography

Waiting as a State of Existence

The Waiting I brings the threshold into the body. The seated figure is isolated against a strong field of darkness, while the surrounding landscape remains only partially legible. The image refuses narrative certainty.

What matters is not what the figure is waiting for, but how waiting changes the experience of time. The body becomes a marker of duration. The viewer is asked to remain with a moment whose beginning and ending are deliberately withheld.

In this sense, Kaplan’s use of silence becomes temporal as well as spatial. The photograph does not merely show a place of waiting; it makes waiting itself into the subject.

Untitled (2025), 2025 — Photography

From 2011 to 2025: The Transformation of the Same Questions

A chronological reading of Kaplan’s portfolio shows that her practice is not tied to a single subject, although certain questions return in different forms over the years. Beginning with Hands Blending into Blue and Ancient Traces in 2011, the selection moves through The Stone Remember I–II, Shutter, Traces of Burden, the 2022 Untitled, Echoes of the Shore I, The Waiting I, and the 2025 works.

Although these works differ formally, there is a clear conceptual continuity. Where does the human being stand? How much past can a place carry? How independent can a body be from its environment? Can an image preserve the past?

The 2025 Untitled work is particularly useful when considering this development. The small figures moving across an unfinished structure place human labour against a broad, almost empty field. The image shifts the question of memory toward construction, change and the provisional nature of place.

Seen alongside Echoes of the Shore II, also from 2025, the work suggests that Kaplan’s recurring interest in transition is not limited to one landscape or one narrative. It can appear in architecture under construction as readily as it can appear at the edge of water.

The value of Kaplan’s practice lies partly in its refusal to provide definitive answers. She returns to the same questions from different points in time. For this reason, it is more meaningful to understand her development not simply as technical progression, but as a deepening of her gaze.

Echoes of the Shore II, 2025 — Photography

Kaplan’s Position Within Photography

To describe Kaplan’s practice simply as “poetic photography” would leave out an important part of her relationship with the medium. The issue is not merely the production of aesthetically compelling images.

Kaplan works at the boundary between the documentary nature of photography and personal interpretation. She begins with a real place, a real encounter or a real body, but rather than leaving the image as it appears, she moves it into a field of emotion and association.

This approach returns us to one of photography’s fundamental questions: “Does photography record reality, or does it reconstruct it?” Kaplan’s work leans towards the second possibility.

A photograph may record a real moment, but the artist’s framing, distance, selection and use of empty space reorganise that reality. Photography, for Kaplan, is therefore not simply a means of freezing reality, but a tool for investigating the invisible relationships within it.

A New Threshold: International Contexts and London

Kaplan’s recent exhibition activity marks an expanding international dimension within her practice. Her work has moved beyond national exhibition contexts into a number of international group exhibitions, placing her photographic language before different audiences and within different artistic contexts.

In 2026, her exhibition activity includes Parallel Traces at Espacio Gallery and Into the Fold at The Holy Art Gallery in London, as well as Eye of the Universe at Design Festa Gallery in Tokyo. She has also participated in major Turkish art-fair contexts, including the VIII IAAF Bodrum Art Fair, Antalya Contemporary Art Fair and III. İzmir Art Fair.

This trajectory is significant not simply because of the number of exhibitions, but because it creates a new context in which Kaplan’s long-term photographic inquiry can be encountered outside its original geographical setting. The questions of place, memory and belonging therefore acquire an additional dimension: how does a visual language rooted in particular places travel between cultures?

Now & Beyond, the international group exhibition taking place at Espacio Gallery in London from 14–17 August 2026, represents another current point in this trajectory. It is important to distinguish this forthcoming exhibition from Kaplan’s completed exhibitions: at the time of writing, it remains an upcoming event.

A further threshold follows immediately afterwards. Kaplan is preparing for her first solo exhibition in London at Gallery Marquess, taking place from 25 September to 1 October 2026. This transition is not simply a move into a new exhibition space. It means that works produced across different periods will be reconsidered within a more cohesive context.

Works encountered individually in group exhibitions will face another question within a solo exhibition: “How do these photographs form a whole when placed together?” This question is particularly important for Kaplan’s practice. The recurring concepts across her work—memory, place, body, waiting, trace and transition—may become a more clearly articulated visual inquiry within the context of a solo exhibition.

In other words, the London solo exhibition represents a new threshold through which Kaplan’s practice to date can be read again.

What Remains After the Image?

It is easy to describe Gunes Kaplan’s photographic practice through terms such as “memory,” “place” or “the human.” Yet the deeper strength of her work emerges not from these concepts individually, but from the relationships between them.

Stone carries the past. The body carries lived experience. Place carries the trace of the human. The shore carries transition.

In Kaplan’s photographs, the boundary between the visible and the invisible never fully closes. The artist allows the viewer to complete the image. Perhaps this is why her photography is better approached not as a document, but as a trace.

A photograph freezes a moment, but Kaplan also attempts to make visible the time surrounding that moment. In a world where images are consumed with increasing speed, this approach becomes especially significant. The value of a photograph lies not only in how striking it is, but also in how long it can remain in the viewer’s mind.

Kaplan’s work resists that speed. It slows looking down. It asks us to look again at the surface of a stone, the weight carried by a body, an empty space, an unfinished structure, or a distant shore.

And eventually, it takes us beyond the photograph and returns us to ourselves. Because in Kaplan’s photographs, the central question is not only what exists within the image, but what remains after the image.

Perhaps this is why Kaplan’s first solo exhibition in London is more than simply a new exhibition. It represents a new stage in which a visual inquiry developed since 2011 is brought together, the relationship between memory and place is reconsidered, and the possibility of transforming individual images into a larger narrative is tested.

Kaplan’s photography does not simply ask us to look at a place. It asks us to consider the trace we leave within it.

For this reason, the silence in her images is not emptiness. It is where remembering begins.

The Stone Remember II , 2014 Photography

Written by Gamze Kartal

Artwork images: Gunes Kaplan’s artist portfolio