I am a Kurdish artist who was born and raised in Turkey and based in Bolonga, Italy. Living as an immigrant in Italy and growing up as a Kurdish Alevi woman in Turkey has profoundly shaped how I think and work. Experiencing what it means to be a minority within a minority, and at times facing exclusion even within already marginalised communities, led me to question not only my sense of identity but the very construction of self and other. Rather than simply holding on to fixed categories, I have learned to see identity as unstable and relational.
This questioning gradually moved beyond human communities. I began to explore the presence of non-human entities, discarded matter, and fragile ecologies. My work seeks a sense of self that does not rely on producing an “other.” For this reason, I am drawn to thresholds such as object and subject, nature and culture, life and death, which I approach through matter and memory. Ex-votos, votive offerings and objects stripped of function are central to this practice because they blur distinctions between human and non-human, body and non-body, absence and presence. I often treat collected fragments as if I were an archaeologist of my own life. Caring for, transforming and intertwining and learning from these objects becomes a form of time travel: as traces change, the past itself shifts, and with it the possible narratives of the future and future ecologies.
My thesis, Sultan’s Legend: Objects Without Shadow, examined the survival of my family members in the Maraş Massacre through the lens of New materialisms by comparing Jane Bennet's Vibrant Matter and Graham Harman's Object Oriented Ontology. In this research I explored how traumatic memories might operate like votive objects, capable of transmitting survival and even healing across generations. I am inspired by Alevi and Sufi poetry, SciFi films and feminist New Materialist scholars such as Jane Bennet, Karen Barrad, Stacy Alaimo.
In late 2024 I was diagnosed autoimmune diesase with rheumatoid arthritis. This diagnosis deepened my attention to the body and its knowledge, opening my research to the notion of transcorporeality, where bodies are porous and always in exchange with environments, histories and other beings. Illness here is not simply failure but a form of entanglement, a reminder of how recognition and rejection circulate within living systems by echoing its enviroment