I (she/her) am an Istanbul-based painter whose practice is rooted in photography and vernacular imagery. I am most interested in images with “no [share] value” that clutter a phone’s camera roll, utilitarian or “bad” images lacking evident indexicality. Most recently, I’ve become interested in ambivalent and unresolved imagery, geared towards the new liminal space of human experience, the role of the “user”. I paint from latent images that guide our attention into a threshold of anticipation and/or apprehension, ascribing a double meaning to the word “latency“, which in the context of photography theory refers to the invisible image produced by the exposure to light of a photosensitive material, but in computing terms may refer to the invisible code that runs under interfaces as well as the delay in data transfer across networks. In this shared lexicon, I recognize a parallel to the liminality of earlier photographic objects which required a level of agency or participation that the passive act of scrolling a feed does not really arouse. In my painting, I seek to reclaim attention, temporality and agency through a process-based approach, straddling the line between drawing and painting and inscribing time/duration onto the picture plane through process.
On a mental plane my work deals with coming to terms with uncertainty and ambiguity. By refusing to resolve and seeking to capture the viewer's attention through accumulation and texture, my paintings project states of suspension rather than closure. They invite a slower, more attentive relationship to imagery and to time, proposing an alternative to the frenetic drive toward resolution that often serves as a response to contemporary uncertainty. Ambiguity functions in my work not as an in-between state, but as a structural condition that mirrors both my lived experience and the instability of the diagnostic frameworks that attempt to categorize states of attention and anxiety. Rather than seeking resolution or clarity, I work within and through uncertainty. My process relies on repeated, rote gestures in painting and drawing that reference historically female-coded practices such as weaving, mending, and knitting. Often performed in half-attentive or dissociative states, these practices foreground duration, repetition, and bodily knowledge over legibility and conscious authorship. This mode of working also responds to contemporary conditions of attention shaped by algorithmic systems designed to fragment focus and accelerate consumption. Whereas these systems demand constant responsiveness and legibility, my practice insists on slowness, opacity, and sustained engagement. Repetition becomes a way of reclaiming attention from predictive feedback loops, redirecting it toward tactile processes that resist optimization.
The digital flattening of expression extends to embodied knowledge and the haptic relationship with physical materials that turn into articulation in painting. As I work, I stay alert to how my sensibility as a painter is being steered by algorithms, using devices in which the processes of seeing, photographing, and sharing are collapsed, ultimately exploring the boundaries of collaborating with and working alongside technology while continually evading becoming flattened myself.