■ "Upcoming movie posters"(photographies. 2025.)

In this photographic series, film posters are shown for films that do not exist.Both in their typographic design and in the visual composition of film posters, references to temporal narratives are made. They function as a kind of trailer for films, creating a general dramaturgical atmosphere meant to evoke curiosity and anticipation for stories yet to be told.Typefaces, within the histories of writing, make references to times and places; yet in the dominant film industry, the choice of typography is typically self-referential. It continues to point back to the same places and the same stories, which are then classified under fixed “movie genres.”In this series, existing typefaces are used. However, the film titles are in German and/or Turkish and refer to people living in Germany with Turkish biographies. They explicitly highlight women* and lesbians of Turkish descent living in Germany.

■ "Erotische Gesellschaftsspiele. Kulturelle Gedächtnisse sind mit ihren Outings überfordert."
(Installation. 2025.)
(group exhibition. 'A-Z. Mapping the Future.' 17. - 26.10.2025. Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart).

In this floor installation, I arrange commercially available playing cards—commonly found in grocery and household stores run by diasporic communities in Germany, specifically sourced from a Kurdish store—on the ground.They spell out the Turkish word for lesbian, Lezbiyen, on the floor.Playing cards are usually played on a table, a raised surface where the eyes can strategically scan and plan the game. Here, however, they lie on the floor—on floors, where I bake bread with my mother, my grandmother, my sisters, and my aunts. Between the cards, I place miniature photographs in which I relate my naked body to a baking tray, Tepsi.I continually ask myself who makes the rules, who is regulated, who plays, and who is played: and whether play is ever truly removed from the seriousness of life—or merely a miniature version of reality.In my family, gambling addiction among men has a long history. Playing cards are objects of value, substituting for a value that the men in our family do not possess—namely, money. Historically, playing cards have also been used for colonial and imperial propaganda purposes. In these games, which mirror a larger political system however, those who gain nothing at all are BIPoC women*.I wonder what happens to the meaning invested in playing cards when the lesbian experience is addressed from a Turkish-biographical perspective. The miniature photographs are not pin-ups; the cards cannot be played with—they are a fixed, immovable part of the installation. Women who articulate their own roles and sexuality in their own words remove themselves from normative attempts at categorization—and they tell their own stories.As a rule, these specific cards can be purchased in two versions, blue and red. I wondered why this is the case. In this installation, both colors lie on the floor, and Lezbiyen rises from them through small handcrafted mirrors, in which one can visually perceive oneself in a fragmented way. The history of playing cards is inseparably entangled with the territorial division imposed by cartographic standardization policies. What we are supposed to perceive as the “front” in a game appears as the European side of the cards. I have wondered since childhood why the back of the cards resembles the carpets we had at home.Consciously, I place the word Lezbiyen with this side facing up. When we play cards, we pretend to hide what carries meaning behind the so-called “back” of the cards. Yet every game ultimately has a rigidly defined ending, with winners and losers. To hide something in plain sight, while everyone knows it is there, is erotic.Eroticism, however, has a very particular significance among women who love women; it does not play by heteronormative, patriarchal rules. It represents the ultimate deviation from a reproductive notion of tenderness, in which a woman is expected to bear a man's legacy—both physically and psychologically. Women express tenderness toward one another differently. When it comes to sex, our intentions are not goal-oriented.One might also consider whether sex is a microcosm of broader systems.

■ An open-process performance in the residency "crack:s" (in collaboration with WKV, White Noise and Fitz Figurentheater, Stuttgart)(Sound Performance. Group Showing. 03.-09. November 2025. FITZ Figurentheater, Stuttgart. 2025.)

During the week-long residency, sound samples of women singing in Turkish were layered and tested as a shared sonic space in combination with my own singing voice.
The rhythm is driven by a moan that is gradually pitched up to the point of exhaustion—a mechanical, repetitive, unsensual moaning, the unreal sound of the fictive notion of penetration and of heteronormative conceptions of sex.The voices of singers such as Neşe Karaböcek, Sertab Erener, Zeynep Bakşi Karatağ, Selda Bağcan, Ayben, and Tülay German were gradually superimposed to the extent that it became impossible to distinguish who was singing what; at times, the layering itself became the central focus. I gradually replace the voices with my own, removing sounds that had previously been present.Throughout the process, the red light shifts to ordinary bright stage and audience lighting. The moaning remains. It slowly fades away.

■ "Abwesende Stimmen in lebenden Körpern"(Video. 2025.)

The video opens with quotes arranged in a triangular movement across the screen. Praying gestures, adopted from cinematic conventions, appear — often interpreted as religious, specifically Christian, signs. The quotes build gradually, beginning with Adolf Loos’s patriarchal view on sex in 'Ornament und Verbrechen', which frames male penetration upon the cross as an “original” ornament.By repeating the white cross against a black screen, a mocking gesture is being built up gradually . Subtitles move with the images, integrating scripture into the visual flow and establishing a rhythm that carries into the movement of repetition. Repetition underlies both litany and the notion of "ornament". Historically, western academics described so-called “primitive” patterns as less valuable than christian, iconographic images, despite their own repetition — a concept applicable to liturgical speech.Building on repetition, the video introduces layered voices: a turkish reading voice paired with a german repeating voice. This opens an acoustic space previously silent, while the turkish text, from Elif Şafak’s Pinhan, retains its autonomy and gender-fluid perspective. As the german voice enters subtly, it forms a whispering texture. Repetition of terms such as “a repetition,” “an original,” “a copy” are mocking the embodiment of speech: language is often reproduced rather than internally generated, raising the question of whether we speak or are spoken by language itself.

• click on video

• legal notice

• privacy policy