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 

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.

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.