There is a place that belongs, by right, to those whose hearts have been broken. Not at the margins. At the center. Whatever is most real tends to gather there.
I make art from this conviction. A face measured is not a face understood. A body recorded is not a body recognized. The systems designed to make us legible — bureaucratic, algorithmic, photographic — do not fail because they are imprecise. They fail because they cannot find their way to the center. What they register is the surface. What they miss is where the person actually lives.
The damage done by our stories of commonality is real and ongoing. They flatten what is most irreducible in each person: the particular interiority that no category, no shared narrative, no collective noun can adequately hold. What survives that flattening — the singular, the unaverageable, the one whose wound no system has room for — that is where my practice begins.
I do not make work that wounds. I make it to be present where something has already happened. I work from Istanbul, which has never permitted anyone the comfort of a single identity. My practice moves across painting, installation, photography, digital work, and writing, not out of restlessness, but because each question arrives in its own form.
Art begins for me where the record ends. In the distance between the file and the face. Between what we are registered as, and what we carry.