Headlands Center for the Arts

Artist Statement

My works span a broad range from drawings to videos, installations to performative works. Often originating from my drawings, my practice includes a multi-layered and performativity requiring production process. Bodily gestures and movements, as well as the editing process including the use of props and costumes, continuously reshape my thoughts. This production process begets the multi-layered videos.

It has always been exciting for me to observe gestures of different cultures. In my videos, the bodily interventions placed in constructed spaces are based on repetitions and adaptations of these different cultural gestures. As they seep into the political connotation of the space they are applied to, these gestures act as agitators revealing what is suppressed within. At the same time, these interventions open up performative spaces where truths of common universal values are continually tried out on both a global and an individual level. The created space forces us to take responsibility as political subjects, and drifts us into the uncanny atmosphere of confrontation.

While at Headlands

During my residency in Headlands, I am planning to complete a set of large sized and small sized drawings as a preliminary study for my new video work. I believe that a new studio atmosphere and brand new encounters will inspire me while I think, read, write, and draw in order to develop new ideas.

My new video work will be dealing with the subject matter of Saturday Mothers and shaped by the interaction between the underground and sky. For years, these mothers gather every Saturday in front of Galatasaray Plaza and collectively mourn for their children whom they have lost in battles and whose corpses cannot be found. I want to become an Orpheus to these women, and call back the ones they have lost. The scenes in the video will develop with my drawings, which will be created with a video composite technique.