ICH KANN MICH JETZT ALS AKADEMIKER*IN TARNEN (I can now camouflage myself as an academic)

I am an interdisciplinary visual artist whose practice operates at the intersection of intergenerational memory, empowerment, and a critical examination of the self in private and public spaces. I understand care—emek in Turkish—as both a political and aesthetic practice: a form of resistance, labor, and memory. Photography is my primary medium, which I use as a means of intervention and re-inscription. Working with my family archive, I explore gestures, touches, and everyday objects as traces of embodied history. By cropping, enlarging, and rearranging these fragments, I fill in the gaps to reframe marginalized bodies and relationships as active subjects. Alongside this, I create intermedial spatial installations, performances, and literary works that interweave photographic and bodily memory. My photographic language oscillates between documentation and staging. Using luminous, symbol-rich still lifes as well self- and family portraits, I examine habitus as an inscription of history—as continuity, repetition, and ruptures. In my portraits, I work with remote control, thus referring to a queer feminist canon that critically questions the medium on the level of the image.