A flying elephant lands on a suspension bridge and throws a red ball at me; a man with an alligator skin box full of gum; a trunked monkey lady with a stage in her palm where midgets put on shows… Using personal experience, dreams, imagination, Turkish culture and language, I strive to recreate my memories through a fantastical lens that juxtaposes real life situations with ephemeral imagined incidents. I juxtapose these different aspects in my visual work, sound pieces and writing. My videos and my mixed media works on paper contain many layers of seemingly unrelated objects to create a magical reality. My stories and sound pieces combine this method with direct translations of Turkish sayings and pure Turkish immersed in English.

As an alien in the US, I often feel misplaced. Sometimes this is a soothing experience, other times it is a cause for loneliness and disorientation. Since missing home is a dominant part of being an alien, I address these emotional, psychological and physical displacements through the reminiscence of place and time. I create an alternative to the lived life, immersing dream-like elements and inventing memories, to feel more connected to my current environment. This makes up for the fact that nowhere really feels like home anymore. I try to make every place I am in, including a bus, a boarding school or the US, my kind of home, and recreate my roots.

For the series of Mixed Media Drawings (digital photo transfers)

“ You've been tied up 
your feet in the mud 
your body roped to a log 
break loose your ties 
get ready for the final flight  ”

                        Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi1

      My work reflects the influence of Rumi’s notion of dreams. Rumi describes dreams as the life of our souls in the land of souls: a place where they drift when we are asleep. He imagines that one’s soul is attached to the ankle of the physical body by a thread which is let loose in sleep, and cut when death comes. The depictions of feet and thread as metaphors refer to this mystical belief as well as his other philosophies that evolved within the Turkish culture, the culture in which I was raised.  

      My work is inspired by dreams. I still remember a vivid dream from my childhood, where I was flying on a block of stone over an orange landscape. Somehow I started to appreciate this dreaming world of poignant images as much as my waking world (even more sometimes). This series of mixed media drawings incorporate the rich imagery of my dreams. As my work progressed, I began to make the subtle connections of dreams to our lives. Although Freud, and Jung are valuable references, my work is not an attempt to interpret dreams. I am interested in finding or creating connections in seemingly unrelated, disconnected objects that refer to the hidden insinuations in dream imagery. The connections blend the world of dreams and reality, and create a visual fusion of this duality. The element of selective memory is key to my process and the final work. Layered images from my photographs and videos are made into transfers to which I add pencil drawing to make visual and conceptual connections. Digital and manual manipulations, along with the unpredictable results of the transfer process such as the bare spots in some areas of the transfer, echo my perception of the creation of dreams through memory.