Deniz Turan
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MunichJewelleryWeek2023
Published: 29.01.2025
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Bio
Deniz Turan (1983, Izmir) is a visual artist based in London&Istanbul. Her artistic practice primarily focuses on art jewelry, sculptural objects, and analogue collages. Between 2018 and 2024, she pursued her artistic work at Atelier Loy, which she founded in Istanbul, and her pieces have been featured in both national and international exhibitions.In 2019, she was honored with the Portojoia Award at the Collectiva Meeting International Exhibition in Portugal. In 2024, she relocated to London, where she currently continues her artistic practice in her studio.
Statement
In Deniz Turan's works, created through the connotations of concepts, images, materials themselves, or colors, her primary pursuit is to achieve a quiet, powerful, and protest-driven language against the dominant impositions of the world perceived through our five senses. In her semi-controlled production process, which is open to potential surprises, the only rule she strictly adheres to is emphasizing the importance of thought and care in "creating" or "making."THE CITY
You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore.
This city will always pursue you.
You will walk the same streets.*
One of the consequences of the increasing anti-democratic practices and pressures in Turkey, especially in recent years, has been people who have had to leave the land they were born and raised. These individuals, whose lives have been shattered, were scattered to other cities and countries like particles losing their mass. Inviting the viewer to realize the sorrow, dilemma, and fear of those who feel compelled to leave while wanting to stay, this work embodied the harsh reality of displacement and the attempt to rebuild a new life, accompanied by the words of a poem** written about a century and a half ago.
*, ** The City, Constantine Cavafy, 1894
Civil disobedience, 2021
Old photographs always impress me. Sometimes, I go to a second-hand bookseller and look at the dusty photos that have been laid about in a box. Smiles and looks of people who passed away from this world long time ago... unclaimed photos that belongs to two lovers or a big family... they are always sad. I think about these people’s lifes who don’t have a place in a one’s family album any more and became forlorn memories. I write new stories for them. They continue to live in another form and story even if their voice,words and breath were depleted. “Civil Disobedience” is a work from the serie ” The Long And Short Of It” that I tell such stories. Perhaps in real life, this soldier who has never seen his loved ones again, has no dramatic end in my story. He was a romantic man and believed in peace. He refused the war, returned to the land of his birth and grew roses in his garden.
Isolated Bride, 2020
Isolated Bride is a work which I have imagined a bride who becomes isolated compulsorily at her own wedding in these hard days. I have tried to express “meaning attributed to objects” and also “meanings which change conditionally” by way of the isolated bride. The concept of “precious” which all of us rethink in the pandemic period is the most important reason why I have prefered freezer bag and toilet paper instead of tulle and lace as materials for this “veil-mask”.
Deep Inside of Me, 2019
"Deep inside of me" is a collection inspired by patterns and poems of Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu, the famous Turkish painter and poet. My ultimate desire for this collection is to say something beyond our body: the physical form of existence, something about our soul and our spiritual scars caused by various reasons. For this desire, “Deep Inside of Me” is a celebration of the losses of each one of us and the gap remained somewhere inside us after such losses and our unspoken words for them. It is my way of celebration and respect.
Despite, 2017
“To keep going despite all the unexpected, compelling and hurting struggles, storms of life, to choose to keep going… and to believe in hope and its glittering existence…”
“Despite” is a projection of the sentences leaked into my soul through the book called “The Dispossessed”* during the time when I was struggling to find a way out despite everything. My self-realization journey has mediated the creation by the soil despite everything, and the hope has created the crack it will spring out from, again by itself.
*The Dispossessed, Ursula K. LeGuin, 1974
41, 2021
As in some cultures, in Anatolia, people believe in the power of good energy-laden breath as they believe in the healing and protective power of words, colors and numbers. Today, still, many people make various charms, amulets or talismans by using such elements for good luck or protection against bad luck. This work is a shadow-copy of a charm that my grandmother made for me when I was a child. She used to make it by using a piece of blue fabric, red thread and forty-one black sesame seeds and of course her own good energy-laden breath. Therefore, this work includes a little “emergency kit” for good luck that you can see the materials which I’ve used them to make the charm.
Hard as Cotton, 2021
In a huge uncertainty that coincident with my 38th age, an effort to find a remedy for the distress that increases from day to day, avoiding to get lost in waiting that like a big black hole.
I had to wait. When I was waiting… touched the colors, just played a game.
There was nothing better that I could do to heal my soul.
That’s the story.
Remember
“Remember” is a kind of abacus that I tried to express my direct or indirect experiences about this pandemic period which equalized all of us with a common concern.
Beads with numbers and marks lined up on wires are the symbols of my own experiences on one hand and reminders that make the viewers think about their own experiences on the other hand. In this way, they create a common language.
This work that refers to the conditions created by the pandemic period is open to different readings in accordance with the own feelings and thoughts of the viewers.
The meaningful bond established by the similarities and differences of what we experience in our own worlds reminds us that we are all part of the same whole and we are affected by the whole as much as we affect it.
CV 
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