Artist Statement

 
Photo by Neslihan Koyuncu

My artistic practice is based on photography as well as video, installation, and performance. I take inspiration from walking and wandering both in nature and the cities. While walking, I explore my surroundings with my body and the camera. I collect fragments from my experiences and focus on making connections. I see this process as a performative act on its own. With my constellation-like connections, I look deep into human experience through forms and abstractions. My subjects are often the thresholds and dualities of life.

I see art-making as traveling aimlessly and letting go of the final destination. I began traveling while I was still a small child, thanks to my father and his own passion for exploration. Beyond the physical act of moving from one location to another, travel is part of one’s search for self. As I became more interested in the journey than the destination, I also began to give more importance to the process in my art practice. Instead of finding answers, I like playing with questions and accidents along the way.

I am more interested in provoking emotion than giving a narrative account. I collect with an inner sense and create archives of imagery and texts. Then, I let them speak to me. I often find myself focused on the sequencing of multiple images rather than the making of single images. Because sequencing still images and things naturally leads to moving images, I work with video and installation as well as photography. I want to immerse the viewer in their own spirituality and unconscious, liberated from the everyday understanding of time and space.

Found images and images that I make are equally important and feed each other, deepening the layers of meaning in my work. My found photography archive has grown from many years of collecting from second-hand shops and flea markets without any aim in mind. Collecting these images is my unplanned visual exercise, analogous to wandering, just as the photographs I make have a counterpart in the travel itinerary. This is life as the continuous exploration of the self.