I (she/her) am an Istanbul-based painter whose practice overlaps indispensably with 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, as well as zooming in on minute details of photographs to reveal their fundamental particles, pixels, and/or grains.
What Jaron Lanier has called “the digital flattening of expression into a global mush” extends to the technics of the body, and the haptic relationship with physical materials that turn into expression 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.
During my time as an MA student in photographic theory, I researched the imminent obsolescence of the object-photograph, whose materiality was, at that time, the late 2000s, still being decimated by the rise of digital photography. In my subsequent painting and drawing practices, I engaged with “bad” or “orphaned” images, piecing together expanding narratives from the contents of camera rolls or social media feeds. These images lacked clarity and traditional aesthetic value, yet they stood out to me with their emotional significance—or punctum—within a sliding ocean of similar lo-fi images. By rendering them in oil paint, I aimed to extend a form of attention and care to what might otherwise be considered ephemeral or insignificant—a gesture that paralleled the deliberate processes of early photography.
In recent years, the broken internet connections I experienced on my lengthy sea commute led to an interest in “low quality image placeholders” (LQIPs). These images, slowly resolving as the data loads, are geared towards the new liminal space of human experience, the role of the “user,” and guiding our ever-capricious attention into a further threshold of anticipation and/or apprehension. This ascribes a double meaning to 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 recognized 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.
My interest in liminality and attention has also surfaced in my photography, particularly through long exposures, which I often took during residencies or other transient settings. It wasn’t until recently, when I captured a long exposure of moonlight on my kitchen floor, that I realized it was the stillness required—something I have often dwelled on and struggled with as a neurodivergent person—that created a sense of communion with the subject. This personal layer has deepened my understanding of the continuity in my focus on latency and attention, from early photography to the digital age.
During my daily practice, I continue to not only build on my longstanding research by exploring how new latent images now permeate digital contexts, but also address my longstanding phenomenological relationship with screens and lenses, translating them into some reflection of suspended attention and crystallized temporality. This involves continual reinvention and weaving together disparate aspects of my practice such as painting, photography, and writing.