Ioanna Kucuradi’s life was a long intellectual journey in which she approached philosophy not merely as an academic discipline, but as a way of understanding the human being and the relationship between humanity and the world. Kuçuradi, who passed away on 2 October 2026, left behind more than six decades of philosophical work, numerous publications, generations of students, and a significant intellectual legacy in the fields of human rights, ethics, and values.

Born in Istanbul in 1936, Kuçuradi graduated from the Department of Philosophy at Istanbul University in 1959 and completed her doctoral studies in 1965. She spent a significant part of her academic career at Hacettepe University. In 1969, she founded the Department of Philosophy at Hacettepe University and served as its head for many years. Through her teaching, research, and the students she mentored, she made significant contributions to the development of philosophy education in Turkey.

At the centre of Kucuradi’s thought were the human being, values, and ethics. How a person, an action, or a situation should be evaluated; according to which criteria values should be considered; and how ethical questions should be approached were among the fundamental concerns of her work. For Kucuradi, who did not regard philosophy as a field of thought detached from life, ethics, values, and human rights were subjects with direct relevance to everyday life. Human relationships, the decisions people make, and the ways in which they evaluate the world were integral parts of this perspective.

This intellectual approach also led Kucuradi towards the field of human rights. In her work on human rights, she established connections between philosophical thought and legal and social questions. Rather than considering human rights solely within the framework of legal regulations, she developed an approach in which they were understood in relation to human value and dignity. In doing so, she established a strong connection between the conceptual world of philosophy and the concrete issues of society.

Kucuradi’s influence extended beyond the boundaries of her academic work. She served for many years as President of the Philosophical Society of Turkey, undertook various responsibilities within international philosophical organisations, and contributed to UNESCO’s work in the fields of philosophy and human rights. She also played a role in the process that led to the establishment of World Philosophy Day. In this respect, her life demonstrated how philosophy could move beyond the walls of the university and reach a broader intellectual and cultural sphere.

Her books also reflected this broad field of thought. Human and His Values, Ethics, Human Rights: Concepts and Problems, Looking at Art through Philosophy, Nietzsche and the Human Being, and Schopenhauer and the Human Being are among the works that stand out in understanding Kucuradi’s intellectual world. She also contributed to philosophical thought through her translations, bringing some of Kant’s major works into Turkish.

One of the most distinctive aspects of Kucuradi’s thought was that she did not distance philosophy from the real questions of life. For her, thinking about the human being, values, ethics, and rights did not simply mean engaging in an academic debate. These concepts extended into many areas of life—from how one looks at another person to how one makes decisions in the face of an event and how social issues are evaluated.

For this reason, it is not sufficient to assess Ioanna Kucuradi’s legacy solely through her published books. The department she founded, the courses she taught, the students she mentored, the institutions in which she took part, her translations, and the work she sustained over many years are all interconnected parts of this legacy. Her dedication to philosophy made her an important thinker not only for her own generation but also for generations to come.

Ioanna Kucuradi’s life came to an end in 2026. Yet what she left behind is not merely a body of published work, but a long academic and intellectual legacy grounded in thinking, questioning, and understanding the human being. Her work on humanity, values, ethics, and human rights continues to engage with questions that remain relevant today.

Looking at her life, it becomes clear that philosophy was, for Kucuradi, not merely a field of study, but also a sustained effort to understand the world and the human being.

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 

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.

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.

For me, art has never been only about making paintings; it has been more about the way I perceive the world and position myself within it. Since childhood, I have been someone who observes, notices details, and experiences emotions intensely. But my path toward painting was not rooted in a single dramatic moment; it grew out of an inner need that accumulated over the years.

At different stages of my life, writing, color, and form opened different spaces of expression for me. At some point, I became aware of the boundary between what words can express and what they cannot. Painting began precisely beyond that boundary. When I realized that I could construct through color, rhythm, and form what I could not describe in words, painting ceased to be simply an activity and became a language for me.

Looking back today, I think the real turning point that led me to become a painter was not so much the need to express myself as the need to transform myself. For me, creating does not mean reproducing what I have lived exactly as it was; it means transforming it into another form. Perhaps that is why my work constantly contains movement, transformation, the search for a center, and the idea of rebirth.

2. When I look at your paintings, I see circles, centers, intersecting geometric planes, and powerful colors. At times they remind me of artists such as Robert Delaunay, František Kupka, and Victor Vasarely—especially in terms of Delaunay’s rhythm of color, Kupka’s circular movement, and Vasarely’s geometric depth. Do you feel a connection between yourself and these artists, or with similar traditions of abstraction? Which painters have influenced you?

I find it very natural for people to see visual affinities between my work and the tradition of geometric abstraction in art history. Delaunay’s rhythm of color, Kupka’s sense of movement, and Vasarely’s geometric depth are all highly significant approaches that expanded the language of abstract art. However, when I work, I do not consciously position myself as someone following the aesthetic systems of these artists.

My starting point is usually an inner state rather than an optical investigation. For me, the circle, the center, intersections, and layers are not merely formal decisions; they are visual counterparts of time, human relationships, ruptures, repetitions, and transformation. So even if we may use a similar geometric vocabulary, the stories we tell within that vocabulary are different.

Of course, I draw from art history, architecture, music, cities, and artists from different periods. But it is difficult for me to point to the influence of a single painter. What affects me most is an artist’s ability to build a distinctive and recognizable language of their own. That is also my central pursuit: to create a visual language so identifiable that, even without seeing the signature, one can sense that a work belongs to Alaz Sağlam.

3. Geometry is very prominent in your paintings. Yet it does not create a mathematical coldness; on the contrary, it produces a highly emotional atmosphere. How do you establish this relationship between geometry and emotion? When you begin a painting, what comes first: form or feeling?

For me, feeling comes first. But that feeling is not transferred directly and uncontrollably onto the canvas; geometry gives it structure.

I see geometry not as a system that limits emotion, but as one that gives it form. Our inner world is often disordered: we can experience longing, anger, desire, fear, hope, or calm all at the same time. The lines, circles, intersections, and centers on the canvas organize this complexity. In a sense, the chaos comes from emotion and the order comes from geometry.

But as the painting develops, these two realms begin to merge. A geometric decision I make at the beginning may later turn into an emotional response; one color may alter another form. So the work is never a fully predetermined mathematical problem. There is a constant negotiation between control and intuition.

Perhaps the sense of movement in my paintings is born precisely from this: there is order, but nothing is ever completely static.

4. Another striking element is color. In your paintings, colors do not simply fill the surface; they seem to move, push and pull against one another, animating the painting from within. Is color an aesthetic choice for you, or a language of expression in its own right? When you choose a color, does it correspond to a particular emotion or memory for you?

Color is definitely not a decorative choice for me; it is one of the primary means of expression in a painting. In fact, sometimes color speaks before form does.

I do not like confining colors to fixed meanings. Red does not always mean passion, and blue does not always mean calm. The same color can carry a completely different emotion in another period, beside another surface, or within a different geometry. I am more interested in the tension between colors: how they elevate one another, how they quiet one another, where they clash, and where they find balance.

When I choose a color, I usually do not think about it for a long time. It begins as an intuitive decision, but afterward a very conscious process of balance comes into play. Because for me, color is not only something that is seen; it is almost a frequency that can be felt.

That is why some paintings speak loudly while others are quieter. Color is one of the elements that determines the volume of a work.

5. I read your book Benden Sonra, although I have not yet read Aşk Kadını. What struck me in Benden Sonra was how simple and direct your language is. In your paintings, by contrast, we encounter an abstract, geometric, and layered language. As an artist, what is the relationship between the world you create with words and the world you create with color and form? Are you telling the same thing in two different languages, or are these two separate, independent versions of Alaz?

I do not think there are two separate Alazs. The source is the same; only the mode of expression changes.

I am more direct when I write because there is an inherent confrontation in language. When you write a sentence, you often have to name the emotion. In painting, I can move around that same emotion without naming it. Instead of explaining it to the viewer, I can make them feel it.

So for me, there is a very simple distinction: when I write, I name the emotion; when I paint, I create a space for it.

Perhaps the difference between the simplicity of my books and the layered structure of my paintings comes from this. In writing, I want to strip away what is unnecessary and arrive at a sentence that is as bare as possible. On the canvas, however, I allow layers, encounters, and contradictions to multiply.

But at the center of both is the human being: love, loss, desire, rupture, beginning again, returning to oneself, and transformation. One speaks through words; the other through color and form.

6. Do you think there is an invisible connection between your paintings and your books? For example, can the starting point of a painting sometimes be a sentence, a poem, or an emotion you were unable to express in a book? Or conversely, can an idea that emerges while writing later become a painting?

There is definitely such a connection, but it does not happen as a direct translation. I do not take a poem and turn it into a painting, nor do I later explain a painting through words. It is more that the same emotion returns at different times through different doors.

Sometimes a single sentence that appears while I am writing can stay with me for a long time. Months later, I may recognize not the sentence itself, but the feeling it left behind, in a painting. Sometimes the reverse happens: after a painting is completed, the space it opens within me can turn into a text or a poem.

I think the subconscious is constantly working between these two fields. I am not always aware of the connection at the moment of creation.

For that reason, I do not see my books and my paintings as two independent careers. They are different records of the same inner world. In one, words remain; in the other, colors. But beneath both there is the same memory and the same person.

7. Let’s step outside the art world for a moment. From the outside, you come across as a disciplined, productive artist who is constantly trying something new. What are you like in everyday life? When you wake up in the morning, is art the first thing you think about, or is there also a very ordinary Alaz, entirely separate from the artist identity?

Of course there is a very ordinary Alaz, and thankfully so. I think living constantly through the identity of the artist can trap a person inside their own image.

I am disciplined when it comes to work, and my mind rarely stops. A new work, an idea, a project, or a sentence I want to write can appear at any moment of the day. But I am also someone who loves the sea, travels, sits around long tables with friends, listens to music, laughs, and sometimes simply wants to do nothing.

The ordinariness of daily life is very valuable to me because it is one of the places from which my work draws nourishment. Art does not happen only in the studio. A conversation, a city, the look in someone’s eyes, a journey, or a moment that seems completely ordinary can later enter the work in another form.

So when I wake up in the morning, art is not always the first thing I think about. But I do not think it is possible for me to completely separate the artist in me from the way I look at the world.

I would also add that, alongside my artistic practice, I have recently been working intensively on an international culture and arts platform that I am developing in the United States, particularly in Miami. I think of art not only as an object to be exhibited, but as part of a broader structure that brings together people, different disciplines, cultures, and the business world. Miami will be the first hub of this project, and from there I want to build an international model that can expand into different cities. So today, in my daily life, I think not only about producing art, but also about how to create a lasting ecosystem around it.

The philosophical foundation of this ecosystem is also explored in my latest book, Yakamoz. Yakamoz is a book with strong philosophical and psychological dimensions, centered on the human capacity to rediscover one’s own light while passing through dark periods, and on inner transformation, awareness, and rebirth. At its core is the idea of not losing the light within us, even when we are tossed around by the storms of life. I describe it as ‘the story of those who do not lose their light, even in the dark.’

8. Let me make the final question a little more personal: Do you believe there is necessarily a connection between an artist’s private life and their work? Could someone who has never met you form an accurate impression of Alaz Sağlam simply by looking at your paintings and reading your books, or do your works actually create a completely different Alaz from the person you are?

I believe there is inevitably some trace of an artist’s life in their work. No matter how abstractly you work, you are still the person making the choices: which colors you place next to each other, where you leave space, what you conceal, and what you make visible—all of that comes from you.

But I also do not believe that art should become merely an explanation of biography. I do not transfer an event from my life onto the canvas exactly as it happened. I transform it. What is personal passes into another language during the creative process, and at that point it no longer belongs only to me.

Someone who has never met me may sense certain things about me through my paintings and books: my intensity, my contradictions, my need for freedom, my relationship with transformation, perhaps my vulnerability and my strength. But I do not think they could fully decipher me.

That is also one of the beautiful things about art. Once a work leaves the artist, it no longer tells only the artist’s story; it also merges with the story of the person standing before it.

So perhaps I can put it this way: through my work, you may be able to feel me, but you cannot fully decipher me. The distance that remains between those two things is part of the mystery of art.

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