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 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 

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.