I am an interdisciplinary artist and a researcher. My projects merge traditional art practice with scientific materials and biological mediums. I collect living microorganisms such as fungus, bacteria, and mold from my surroundings, then transfer them into a synthetic but habitable environment where I witness living organisms’ endless interactions, struggles, and conflicts across the picture surface.
 
Simultaneously natural and artificial, the synthetic environment provides a stage on which I act as creator and curator while it serves as a vivarium for microscopic organisms. While decontextualizing the microorganisms living in nature, I also make them visible to our eyes with distinct colors and forms. Once my work is completed, microorganisms shift from the microscopic world to the macroscopic world. Forming borders, divisions, and edges, I create visual and observable interactive biological landscapes

Fertile Faces, 2022-Ongoing, Mold spores on Polaroid covered with epoxy, 4.233 x 3.483 inches

‘Fertile Faces” combines photography and biological mediums. This project is an ongoing project since 2021. It started during my residency at Istanbul Art Residency and continued at Mass MoCA artist residency in 2022. In this interactive project, Participants contribute with their portraits and microorganisms taken from their bodies.
 
Mold spores are considered a destructive power. However, in this project, mold spores carry the concept of portrait into a new physical reality. I take polaroid portraits of the participants and collect mold spores from their bodies. Then, these microscopic organisms are applied to the polaroid to destroy their portraits. Each person’s unique microbiome transforms the portrait into a new reality. This process makes the microorganisms in participants' bodies visible with distinct colors, textures, and forms. The unseen inhabitants’ interactions and their natural forms create a new identity for the participants. mold spores that we recognize as harmful, reconstruct their portraits.
 

I use live microscopic mold that leaves physical inscriptions by direct contact on the surface of a paper or board, which creates a living platform. In Contamination Series, the surface of each panel is laced with graceful, brilliant mold until the entire surface is covered and patterned with circular borders. Then, I assembled these forms and shapes that mold produced, to create various visual references that can relate to both natural and human impacted landscapes. The forms have similarities to human-induced activities on the landscape. They create territories, boundaries, and borderlines and end up with conflicts on the picture surface.

"If the artistic process is more interesting than the outcome, as some modernists hold, then the greatest artist is nature itself. Its systems are endless and inexorable, even if the results aren’t always impressive to the naked eye. Take, for example, the fungal experiments of Selin Balci, one of five former Hamiltonian Artists fellows who return to the gallery in “Empirical Evidence.” The Turkey-born Marylander is exhibiting such seemingly inert items as petri dishes that contain slowly evolving mold spores. Far more dramatic is a more artist-directed piece, a five-minute fast-motion video in which molds spread across a world map. It demonstrates the power and scope of the tiniest living things."
Mark Jenkins, October 1, 2021, The Washington Post
 

"Balci gives living microbes a place to grow and organize themselves on specially prepared plates. The microorganisms, which normally are invisible to the naked eye, are made visible in these conditions. They create maps of “territories” as they battle for the food sources, and their behavior is disturbingly parallel to many scenarios of human conflict. The artist organizes and assembles the landscapes or maps that result from these natural migrations into abstract compositions that are limited in tonal variation but elegant in form."

by Claudia Rousseau, Gazette.net, September 18, 2013. 
 

"If the sinister, fast-growing fuzz that claims your forgotten strawberries for the trash triggers your gag reflex, you might need a little art therapy. In a rare feat of left- and right-brain cooperation, local biological artist Selin Balci uses microorganisms as her medium, shepherding their colonies’ colors and textures into elegant, kaleidoscopic three-dimensional patterns. "

by CHRISTINA CAUTERUCCI  
SEPTEMBER 19TH, 2014

Invisible Istanbul, 2021, Microscope slides and mold spores covered with epoxy resin

During my residency in Istanbul, I focused on Istanbul’s environmental problems. With a population of 16 million, Istanbul is the largest city in Turkey. Unfortunately, Istanbul has been experiencing environmental pressures due to population growth, industrialization, and rapid urbanization. As a result, Istanbul is experiencing increased air, water, and sea pollution. To address these challenges, I used mold spores as a destructive force. I used landscape images of Istanbul and interrupted the charming scenery with the mold spores isolated from its ground. This project creates a memory of Istanbul; documenting, preserving, and creating a historical record of living beings during my residency period.

My recent focus has been on human impacts on nature. These impacts can be profound, ranging from the changes in the environment that adversely influence biodiversity to climate change. We managed to destroy ecosystems by acquiring more land to build homes and cities or transforming ecosystems into agricultural fields to feed the ever-increasing population. Perhaps for many, human-induced impacts are unnoticed and only acknowledged after experiencing the outcomes on a personal level. However, ignored circumstances may change our lives for the worst, such as the microbes existing in our surroundings. Worrying about the environment gave me the idea of preserving my surroundings in the proposed ‘Preserved Land’ project.

In these videos I used the mold spores collected from my surroundings to make the invisible microbiome visible while documenting, preserving, and creating a historical record of microbial life existing around me. All the mold spores are collected from where the polaroids are taken. 

Bordered World, Evolving mold in 2500 Petri dishes at Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, NY, 2014-15
 
Bordered World creates a competition for resources, territorial wars, and struggle for power and control among living organisms. In this project, I reference the fundamental, underlying social dilemmas and principles of our existence in an effort to understand and highlight social issues. My concepts are explored using living entities such as fungus and mold to recreate observable interactions and conflicts across the picture surface, where the outcomes reveal boundaries, edges and distinctive forms. In Bordered World, all vital resources are restricted. This limited environment makes microbes compete for resources, dominate a particular area or become invasive and endanger others. When they share the same living platform, a conflict for resources arise and eventually this results with a borderline. The behaviors of the microorganisms resemble human actions and motives. Visually representing the world map, these microbes act as metaphors for war and the human predicament.

"In Selin Balci’s bio-art installation Bordered World, 2,500 Petri dishes compose a three-dimensional kaleidoscopic world map representing the universal struggle for survival and dominance. Within each hand “painted” Petri dish, live molds and fungi are in an observable battle for limited resources.  Distinctive borders slowly form and new colonies develop during this microscopic feud."
Smack Mellon Curator 

I used mold to specifically refer to human behavior, culture and society. The world's political map was re-created on a board with growth media (food), then different microorganisms were placed to represent each country. The work demonstrates human actions, form of power, political pressures, immigration, racialism and the dominance of superior countries.

"The map-based works present this phenomenon in stark terms, played out as geopolitical headlines ripped from the paper. The World depicts worlds run amok by war, disease or possibly famine. Faint pencil outlines suggest physical boundaries that the organisms push to the brink. Teaming and frothing, they have no “place” to go, and so they turn on one another in a game of brinkmanship, drawing boundaries with battlegrounds in an effort to gain the upper hand. The pieces are both eerie and transfixing, haunting yet mesmerizing, and their underlying message could be ignored offhand, if not for the fact that we see similar battles taking place today in regions as remote as Syria and as near as Dallas." Eric Hope for East City Art, 2014.