My work examines science, nature, mobility, and politics through an (a)historical and contemporary lens, exploring transdisciplinary issues within a technoscientific context. In my studio practice, I synthesize various activities including research, visualization, documentation, production, and presentation to create broad and meaningful visual environments around scientific and political phenomena. Integrating technology as both subject and means of expression, I explore issues considered sensitive in the public discourse, unlocking them from the rigid political categories in which they normally reside. I believe that art is the only contemporary arena that can present critical perspectives on an issue in a multilayered, transgressive, sometimes dissonant, yet progressive, way.
Both in content and form, my work is influenced by critical theory, a thought landscape with which I am consistently engaged. When I began my artistic practice, my work was strongly rooted in post-structuralist perspectives, focusing on Foucault’s epistemologies and Deleuzian theories as they relate to aesthetics. As my work developed, my influences have expanded to include Donna Haraway’s theories that relate to post-humanism. My most recent body of work is grounded in Timothy Morton’s radical concepts, which argue that the very idea of nature will take on a new and expanded definition to include a fuller scope of our environment than it currently does.
In an effort to create the most effective presentations, I move fluidly between various media, including photography, video, and visualization of quantitative information and programmable media. Over thirty presentations of my works have appeared as museum, gallery, or public space installations, and many others in screen-based formats, including
online works.
Technoscientific Inquiry
For more than a decade I pursued Mutant Space, a long-term, techno-scientifically critical, research-driven art project on nuclear mobility, radiation, geology, and archaeology. I embarked on expeditions to nuclear sites of importance worldwide and created visuals that reflect radioactivity through science, design, and archaeology. The first research trip was to Chernobyl in Ukraine, which has a key role in the history of nuclear science and politics. I followed that with visits to the Hanford Site in the U.S., Metsamor in Armenia, Onkalo in Finland, and Moruroa in French Polynesia.
Since initiating Mutant Space, I have regularly exhibited the project in Europe and the U.S. With the support of Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, I embarked on an expedition vessel with a group of artists and scientists to research sites bombarded by France’s military in Polynesia in the South Pacific Ocean. My work Mutant Space: Tepoto Sud morph Moruroa was displayed at the Center for Contemporary Arts in Singapore, Le Fresnoy Museum in France, and the Royal Institute of Arts in Sweden.
I owe my interest in archaeology to my youth in Anatolia, which possesses a historical record spanning over 9,000 years and has always inspired and informed my work. In 2016, one of the important editions of Mutant Space, titled Mutant Space, Metsamor, was displayed at the Archaeology Museum in İstanbul as part of the Design Biennial curated by Mark Wigley and Beatriz Colomina. Well-aligned with the biennial’s overarching curatorial manifesto naming archaeology among the fields contributing greatly to the future of design, the project was realized in 3D prints and a VR animation that displayed juxtaposed layers of Bronze Age artifacts and nuclear waste.
In 2022, I participated in the İstanbul Biennial curated by Ute Meta Bauer, Amar Kanwar, and David Teh, exhibiting Mutant Time, a survey of my research over the past ten years on radiation and archaeology. Activating the industrial archaeological character of the site where the work was shown, I created a lens into deep nuclear time, contemplating Artist Statement ‘the nuclear’ as a time-space interface. The visual style of the work is an outcome of studies of explosions, sublime frequencies, overtones, and the gaze they leave in the landscape.
Public Space Installations
In addition to Mutant Space: Tepoto Sud morph Moruroa and Mutant Time, my most recent, large-scale, public-space installation, O, is a site-specific exploration of the vertical horizons of an industrial archaeology site in Beykoz, İstanbul. These silos—vertical, circular buildings that were once used for crude oil storage—constitute the form and
medium of this installation. Inspired by the principles of fluid dynamics and the Bernoulli equation of pressure distribution, the projected imagery undulates and morphs, inviting viewers into a vision of architecture and its scientific history. As viewers traverse the space, they encounter a shifting panorama of perspectives within the industrial landscape.
Participatory Projects
Inhabiting the role of facilitator or producer, and collaborating expansively with other practitioners, has been a natural development of my process as an artist and designer. In 2015, delving into the idea of anti-crisis, I looked at human mobility in Western Asia, Europe, and the U.S., and coupled this with researching the mobility and evolution of apricots, both historically and genetically. Through this research, I created a new narrative encompassing the issues of migration and borders. For this work, I was the recipient of the 2015 apexart Franchise Program award in New York, which enabled me to organize an accompanying publishing project and group exhibition featuring seventeen other artists, Apricots from Damascus, co-produced and hosted by the museum SALT in İstanbul. The same year, I took part in the public programming of Olafur Eliasson’s Greenlight Project with a day-long lecture on Modularity and Code in the Context of Mobility, hosted by Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary in Vienna.
Currently, I am working on THE UNIVERSITY _ A PROJECT, a participatory publication and exhibition project on academia consisting of notebooks to be filled by artists and scholars whose careers problematize relationships between art, design, architecture, and the academy. The source of inspiration for this project is a limited-edition book by Walter Gropius and The Architect Collaborative, Report on The University of Baghdad. My project addresses the idea that universities of the modern age are global utopias that project themselves as spaces for knowledge production and transmission, critical thought, and reflection—for freedom of the mind and speech. Yet, universities are also institutions that reproduce historical and political privileges, shore up settled bodies of knowledge, and train individuals to acknowledge authority and occupy their place in society.
In addition to these modalities of production, I am also interested in art historical, biographical, and appropriation-based research methods, especially as they pertain to design practice. My work in the inaugural exhibition of the İstanbul Modern Museum, Teaching a GAN the Alphabet, joins an art historical canon. It is a response to Baldessari’s 1972 work Teaching a Plant the Alphabet, the project contemplates the possibility of interspecies communication.