Bio
Born in 1974 in Svishtov, Bulgaria, to a family of Turkish ancestry, my early years were spent behind the “iron curtain”, and were marked by political repression, trauma, a spiritually barren social landscape and cultural displacement. During the 80s, my family and I relocated to Tripoli, Libya, as expat refugees, where I first studied photography at an international school. These early-life dislocations and ongoing struggles with chronic illness have shaped my work, which begins, at first, as a search for (an ultimately elusive) cohesion between body and self, person and environment, history and belonging.
I’m interested in the camera as a generative instrument rather than a simple documentary tool. Through choreographed collaborations with subjects and intensive post-production, my photographs are acts of worldbuilding. I use techniques like solarization, tonal inversion, motion blur, and other distortions to construct subtly surreal and symbolically layered pictorial worlds that oscillate between figuration and abstraction.
