There is an old idea I keep coming back to, that the broken-hearted have a place that is theirs by right. Not off to the side. At the center. Whatever is most real seems to collect there.
I work from that idea, though I try not to make a religion of it. The wound isn't a badge, and it isn't a competition. Everyone has one. Life is not a race to see whose hurts most. What holds me is something narrower than pain itself: the place where a person breaks is usually the place where they begin to learn something an easier life would have kept from them. I want the work to be there when that happens. Not to cause it, and not to put it on show.
A face that has been measured is not a face that has been understood. I know this from the inside, because I have built the machines that do the measuring. They read the surface with real precision and miss the person completely. The systems that make us legible, whether they are run by clerks, algorithms, or cameras, don't fail because they are careless. They fail because all they can keep is what can be averaged and matched, and the part of someone that resembles no one else is exactly the part that slips through.
I have also come to distrust a certain idea of togetherness, the one that says we are held together by what we have in common. I think it is closer to the reverse. A hundred people on the same note are not a choir, they are a crowd. The music only begins when each voice finds its own line. So difference, for me, is not the enemy of what we share. It is the price of it, and probably the whole point.
I live and work in Istanbul, a city that has never let anyone get away with being one simple thing. My work moves between painting, installation, photography, digital pieces, and writing, less because I can't sit still than because different questions seem to ask for different bodies.
Art begins, for me, where the record ends. In the gap between the file and the face. Between what we are registered as, and what we actually carry.