Artist Biography

Born in Kayseri in 1993, they graduated with top honors from the Painting Department of Erciyes University’s Faculty of Fine Arts in 2019. The same year, they began a scholarship-funded master’s program in Art and Culture Management at Yeditepe University, which they successfully completed.  

After graduating, they curated several exhibitions and participated in numerous group shows. They currently live and work in Istanbul.

The Poetics of Decay  

The artist documents not only an organic process of decomposition but also a universe of metaphors shaped by time and neglect by centering bread left to mold for 1-2 months in their work. This process confronts viewers with both the inevitability of biological decay and humanity’s tendencies toward forgetfulness, overconsumption, and political apathy. Mold transcends its role as a passive endpoint; the transformation captured in the artist’s photographs allows decay to evolve into a political and poetic language.  

The work interrogates how industrial capitalism marginalizes objects with expired "useful lifespans" as "waste." The moldy bread becomes a reflection of societal fissures that go ignored. Echoing Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence, this condition amplifies the silent cry of the "devalued." Through decaying objects, the artist calls on viewers to confront the people and ideas excluded by the system.  

In a psychological reading, mold symbolizes the surfacing of suppressed traumas. While the human mind protects itself through forgetting, the artist subverts this defense mechanism. The mold stains spreading across the bread’s surface evoke Carl Jung’s imagery of the collective unconscious: just as the unconscious struggles to bring the repressed to the surface, the mold disturbs viewers as a physical reality. The process, documented through photography, points to the painful yet liberating power of remembrance.  

Within art history, the work reinterprets the 17th-century vanitas tradition through a modern lens. Moldy bread replaces skulls and wilting flowers as symbols of transience. Like Joseph Beuys’ installations emphasizing nature’s transformation or Dieter Roth’s sculptures of decaying food, this piece merges the inevitable dissolution of the organic with political critique. Yet the artist frames decay not merely as an end but as a form of aesthetic resistance: what consumer culture dismisses as "waste" is imbued with new meaning.  

This poetics, reminiscent of Nietzsche’s assertion that “Decay is simultaneously an ascent,” underscores that decay gains significance only when made visible. By tracking mold’s spread over two months, the artist excavates forgotten layers of collective memory. The work invites viewers to confront not only impermanence but also the resilience budding within transformation. Here, decay is redefined not as an end, but as a process that creates space for the birth of new meanings.

“My Scars Series II”

2022, Digital Intervention on Photography, 

Size 91x61 cm edition 1/5