I believe that those who have been broken-hearted have a place that is rightfully theirs. Not at the margins, but at the very centre of the world. Because breaking is the moment when our relationship with the world, and with ourselves, can no longer continue as it did before. In that moment, the order we have known begins to fall apart. The names, habits, roles, and explanations that have defined us lose their place, at least for a while. Perhaps this is where reality begins to reveal itself, through the crack.
I build my practice from this threshold.
I am not interested in romanticising heartbreak. Nor do I want to turn pain into an identity, a privilege, or a belief. I know that everyone is broken by something. But I am not interested in turning suffering into a hierarchy. What interests me is less the break itself than the space it opens up. Sometimes it is only when we can no longer continue as we were that we begin to learn something a more comfortable life could never have taught us. For me, part of what art can do is remain present in that place where such learning begins.
Whether I am painting, writing, recording an image, or building a device, I return to the same question in different forms. If a person is more than the sum of everything that can be said about them, where does that excess reside?
Perhaps this is what keeps bringing me back to systems designed to measure, record, and classify us. What is the difference between the record that can be kept of a person and the person themselves?
A system can recognise a face with extraordinary precision without ever truly knowing that face. I say this not as an outside observer, but as someone who has built the devices that perform these measurements and worked their way into the code. Cameras, algorithms, and data systems can describe a person in ever greater detail. The proportions of a face, the distance between the eyes, the width of the lips, the angle of the jaw, the frequency of a voice, the rhythm of movement. All of these can be measured and compared with data gathered from other people. This is precisely what makes them meaningful as data.
But the difference that interests me begins somewhere else.
I believe that in every person there is something that belongs only to that person, something that exists in no one else. I am not saying that this cannot be measured. It may well be measurable. But there is no second example against which it can be compared. The measurement can be made, yet the measurement itself no longer produces knowledge. For a measurement to become meaningful, it needs some common ground with something else. What I am looking for lies precisely outside that common ground.
Perhaps there is no word for it. A word is itself a measure. The moment we name something, we place it within a concept that can be shared with others. Language allows us to agree on a common meaning, but in doing so it also draws the singular into a common category. And yet I believe that every person carries something that we cannot name, something that does not fully correspond to anything else.
Systems appear to search for this singularity when they try to distinguish one person from another, but they can only do so through measurable signs. They can identify what differentiates us from one another, but not necessarily what makes each of us singular. This distinction matters to me. Verifying who a person is is one thing. Understanding why that person is only themselves is another.
For this reason, difference is not only a political or social matter for me. It is one of the conditions of being human. I have always been wary of the idea that what holds us together is what we have in common. A choir does not make music if everyone sings the same note. Music begins when the voices separate and each finds its own line. Difference is not the opposite of what we share. It is the condition that makes sharing possible.
Similarity can be measured. What can be measured can be compared. Comparison requires common ground. And the moment common ground is established, the possibility of ranking appears. More and less. Normal and abnormal. Inside and outside. Measurement, therefore, is never simply a neutral act of observation. Every measurement reconstructs the world according to a particular order.
My work is concerned with the space between that order and what lies beyond it. With the distance between the point at which a person enters the record and what remains theirs after the record has been made.
This is also why different media are not separate fields of production for me. I move between painting, photography, installation, digital works, and writing not because I cannot remain faithful to a single medium, but because each question searches for its own material and its own form. Sometimes I look for the same distance in the surface of a face, sometimes within data, sometimes in the gaps of a text. The distance between the person represented and the representation itself. The path taken after the record ends. What remains between the file and the face. The gap between the name we are given, the person we are recorded as, and what we actually carry.
I live and work in Istanbul, a city that has never allowed itself to fit neatly into a single identity, time, or story.
For me, art begins where the record ends. In what the system leaves out as excess. Because sometimes what makes us human is not what can be entered into the record, but what remains after the record has been made.