BIO

Can art be justified if it breaks someone's heart? My unwavering stance is a resounding no. Art neither assaults nor defends. It becomes morbid when it impedes life or hinders our understanding of it. I don't conform to the archetype of the artist who sacrifices all for the sake of art. Art is not born out of forfeiting life; it emerges when summoned, providing as much as it demands, and thus, permeating every aspect of existence.

I frequently perceive art as an instrument of restoration — mending the damage inflicted by the narrative of "our commonalities unite us" upon our civilization. Each individual is singular and irreplaceable. It is not our similarities that bind us together, but rather our distinctive originality. This is where art begins. It neither inflicts pain nor annihilates; instead, it bestows life.

My academic formation is in Turkish-Islamic art history — a discipline that has thought carefully for centuries about representation, ornament, and the politics of the visible. I hold an MA from Marmara University and teach at Istanbul Medipol University's Faculty of Fine Arts and Design. This is not a parallel career running alongside my artistic practice. The questions I encountered in art history — who gets depicted, under what conditions, with what consequences, and what a visual system reveals about the civilization that produced it — are the same questions that run through my paintings, my installations, and my digital work. The East-West axis, the biophilic-necrophilic tension, the problem of representation from a position that was never at the center: these are not themes I chose. They are the coordinates I inherited from a formation that trained me to look at images as acts of power.

The handle I use across digital platforms — @jayaka — is Sanskrit for "victorious," which is also the meaning of Muzaffer in Turkish. Sanskrit sits at a rare intersection: it is simultaneously one of the oldest languages of the East and the root of the Indo-European family that produced most Western languages. That double belonging — fully Eastern, ancestrally Western — felt like an honest description of where I stand. I chose the name before I ever visited India, following something I sensed before I could articulate it.