Yakışıklı Oğlum
Yakışıklı Oğlum, 2025
“Yakışıklı Oğlum” is a series that presents portraits of men placed in childish, kitschy, and gaudy picture frames. The decorative borders symbolise the way some mothers continue to view their sons: as eternally perfect, innocent, and handsome, no matter what they've done or become. The phrase “Yakışıklı Oğlum” ("My Handsome Son") is even misspelled on many of the frames, but that distortion goes unnoticed, camouflaged by the deeply distorted gaze of parental idealisation.
This project challenges a cultural narrative many of us know all too well: the myth of the untouchable golden boy. He is the pride of the household, endlessly praised for his looks, his manners, his supposed goodness. Yet behind this glorified image often hides a more troubling reality of men who ghost, cheat, manipulate, harass, and sometimes even harm. And still, they are excused, defended, forgiven because “he’s a good boy.”
Through satire and symbolism, this work exposes how dysfunction is mistaken for charm, cruelty is rebranded as charisma, and plain mediocrity is elevated to greatness under the warm filter of unconditional maternal love.
No, your son is not perfect.
No, he is not the most handsome man in the world.
And yes, he might be the problem.
The Family
The Family: An Exhibition of Estranged Lives and Unlived Dreams, 2024
In this house, everyone is creative.
Their absence was always so beautifully composed, like a still life. A hand left unfinished on a sketch, a piano half-played, a cigarette burning in silence. They were never really there, but they left behind such poetic traces, it almost felt like love.
Each room held someone immersed in their own world, memories tugging at them like old songs, dreams keeping them just distracted enough to never notice one another.
Everyone was always busy. And in all that busyness, I was quietly disappearing.
We never truly shared anything.
The house was full of deep experience, but not connection.
Each person simmered alone, eyes turned inward, their doors always closed.
And I stopped knocking. After a while, it felt pointless.
Even now, I wonder:
If they opened their doors. would they even recognise me? Know me?
We were shaped by separate hands, cast in different moulds. I learned to be small and quiet and good at vanishing.
But somehow…
somehow there’s still something holding us together.
Something invisible. Maybe it’s shared blood. Maybe it’s shared longing.
Maybe it’s the simple fact that none of us ever really got what we needed.
A tiny thread, smaller than a fly’s head—
but strong enough to pull us back to this house.
To these rooms.
To each other,
even if only in memory.
Keep the Vampires from Your Door
Keep the Vampires from Your Door, 2023
So, imagine this: the garden at dusk. Shadows are getting longer, everything's taking on that weird in-between glow, and there's this figure. Dark, almost blending into the scenery but just noticeable enough to catch your eye. It's like playing a game of hide and seek with a ghost.
You can’t help but feel a smile at your lips. The idea of a vampire in your garden—it's ridiculous, isn’t it? And yet, there's that soft hiss you think you hear when the wind rustles the leaves. A shiver that has nothing to do with the cooling night air.
There's that dark figure again, just by the ancient oak. Or was it by the rose bushes? It’s always there, lurking, teasing, but never fully showing itself. It's as if the garden itself is in on the joke, conspiring with the night to keep you on edge.
Think about the charm of it all, the way the garden has changed. It used to be so peaceful, now it’s like a stage for some dark, whimsical play. The figure is almost playful, in a sinister kind of way. You can’t help but smile, a mix of fear and humor.
"Keep the vampires from your door," you think, half-smiling at the absurdity, half-terrified. Shadows play tricks, but what if they're not tricks? In this moody, dark, quirky garden, anything seems possible. The next shadow might just come to life.
Divine Damage
Divine Damage, 2023
Divine damage, the kind that shakes your soul and leaves you reeling, is not always the work of a vengeful deity. Sometimes it's the result of an earthquake, the earth's own transformational force that tears apart the land and scatters the debris of human life.
Divine damage is the inescapable consequence of our imperfect human nature. We are flawed creatures, constantly inflicting harm on ourselves and those around us. But perhaps this damage is not without purpose. Perhaps it is necessary. Perhaps it's the only way to truly see the world for what it is, to break through the surface of our mundane existence. It's a reminder that we are not in control.
Divine damage is the trembling of a metaphorical ground that shakes the very foundation of our existence. It's the kind of transformation that can turn trash into treasure and reveals the potential in the discarded, the forgotten, the overlooked. Divine damage can be a catalyst for change, an opportunity to reimagine our relationship with the world around us. It reminds us that even in the darkest of times, there is hope for transformation and renewal. Divine damage may leave us shaken and uncertain, but it also presents us with an opportunity for growth and change. We can take the broken pieces of our lives and transform them into something new, something beautiful, and something that speaks to the resilience of the human spirit.
In divine damage, the earthquake is not just a moment of destruction, but a chance to tear down old structures to make room for something new. Despite the darkness and pain it creates, there is a strange kind of beauty in it; the beauty in the brokenness. And this beauty that can only be found in the darkest corners and hidden depths of the human soul.
No Land Can Hold My Body
No Land Can Hold My Body, 2021
Canbora Bayraktar & Yeliz Yorulmaz
No Land Can Hold My Body marries imagery that evokes a make-believe space travel, with culturally loaded landscapes and symbols. This project is a refinement of our deep-seated emotional states, experiences and moods in Australia over a decade. We set off on our wanderings in pursuit of our desire to find a place we call home. This alternate home is an imaginary land that is the mélange of our playful dreams and memories, and disappointment in their knock-off. The installation humorously suggests both fantasies of escape (dreaming about finding a 'home' on another planet) and possible realities of fantasies (knowing that if we find it, it will be another 'not-home'). The analogy of a stillborn space exploration is visually defined through a spaceship destined to fall and a fallen meteorite weirdly familiarised by some ordinary household objects.
Thinks About Thinking, Not Thinking and Non-Thinking
Thinks About Thinking, Not Thinking and Non-Thinking, 2021
Audrey Newton & Yeliz Yorulmaz
Audrey Newton and Yeliz Yorulmaz’s installation explores the elusive, ungraspable ideas that artists sometimes find impossible to fully realise. Inspired by Franz Kafka's enigmatic creature, The Odradek, from The Cares of a Family Man, this installation brings forth a metaphor for those persistent yet unmanifested visions. Like Kafka’s peculiar, star-shaped spool with loose, hanging threads, the Odradek embodies an anthropomorphic, unsettling presence that echoes the artists’ own encounters with ideas that resist definition yet linger in their minds.
The Masterpiece
The Masterpiece, 2020
The Masterpiece is a series of digital manipulations recasting European masterpieces with African American subjects, and inappropriately re-produces them as mass marketed consumer products.
The most common oil paintings in classical art featured in major museums are the portraits of European royals, who are usually white men. These commissioned oil paintings reflect the reality of an expanded aristocracy and moneyed class of wealthy landowners, powerful military figures, privileged royal families and merchants, many of whom would have gained their wealth from the enslavement, exploitation and forced labour. While these “masters” of masterpieces who could afford the expensive costs of commissions were important enough to be recorded visually, many dark-skinned people were either depicted in servile roles or later erased by Western art history through whitewashing. – They were later painted white or cropped out from the printed and digital reproductions. – The first goal of this series is to address the apparent absence of black figures in art history and the lack of ethnic diversity in national art collections.
Contemporary capitalist societies are still run by the hierarchies of money and status. Humans are forced to see everything through the prism of profit, and encouraged to remake, appropriate and re-appropriate resources as long as there are consumers to pay the price. Considering the power of capitalism to turn everything into commodities including all corners of personal, social and political life, –mass tragedies, cultural shifts, core values, personal anxieties and dilemmas – it is impossible not to worry about the devastating consequences of this emotional erasure and violence in which people are rendered numb. In this work, the conversion of the late masterpieces into capitalist commodity products aims to demonstrate how little has changed when it comes to the harassment and abuse of ethnic minorities and working-class people at the hands of institutions of power. In a market-based world that we live in, the commodity fetishism masks the new exploitative relationship between wealthy and powerful buyers and sellers, and the products/resources/values/situations being exchanged. Museums are turning into gift shops and department stores – as Andy Warhol’s famous quote says “Someday, all department stores will become museums, and all museums will become department stores” –but who really needs Van Gogh duvet cover, Mona Lisa socks or Basquiat door mat. Inspired by these commodified/degraded art pieces without much left to say of any importance, the second aim of this series is to question why everything has a potential to be a money-making opportunity, and has to be obsequiously served to the elite to fulfil the ideals of bourgeois consumption and lifestyle in this careless and greedy systems of mass modernity and advanced capitalism?
Twombly's Wife
Twombly's Wife, 2019
watercolour and hand stitching on fabric, 51 x 47cm
Twombly's Wife is a playful and satirical demonstration of how women's work, specifically handcrafts and domestic work have historically been dismissed and devalued within the art world and in the everyday. The downgrading of work associated with women, domesticity and femininity can be seen as a form of oppression and resulted in the neglect of women artists, and the female existence in general. This neglect is explored in Twombly's Wife through a fictional character who stays under the shadow of her husband. She imitates her husband's gestural line work and his scattered, unruly shapes and marks by stitching them on fabric scraps. While Twombly's cacophony of signs, his confident spontaneity and intense passions evoke freedom and lightness, her needlework suggests a forced/fake attempt to freedom, confidence and spontaneity. Her intricate, restricted, painstaking and premeditated stitching transforms these lines and shapes into the symbols of repression, impotence, control and submission. Her work made with "low" thread (and produced in a domestic context such as a kitchen table) indicates, and makes fun of, a gendered hierarchical division between his highly valued fine art (produced in studios using artistically significant materials) and her traditional/everyday feminine activities and tasks with no artistic or productive value. Not even having her own name, Twombly's Wife represents women whose work and creativity have been belittled, ignored or deliberately suppressed by the male domination.
This planet is horrid. I am part of it
This planet is horrid. I am part of it, 2019
digital print, dimensions variable
As the natural balance of the world collapses, the earth transforms into a vast, chaotic urban jungle. Forests are flattened, trees are replaced by towering buildings and sprawling networks of pipes. Flowers and food vanish, substituted with rubbish, smoke, and pollution. In this distorted environment, animals are no longer in their element. They are survivors, forced to adapt to messy, foreign habitats that no longer resemble the homes they once knew.
They navigate through concrete and steel, desperately trying to remain present in a world that has forgotten them. Their instincts drive them forward, but survival here means adapting to a world never meant for them.
This series explores the fractured relationship between urban development and the natural world, portraying a dystopian environment where the wild is displaced, and life is forced to evolve. Coexistence has been replaced by domination. It is a visual reflection on the loss of harmony, and a reminder that I, too, am part of this horror.