Kelimeler Kıyafetsiz (:Words Naked/Are Not Enough) is a research project on representations of women in political speech from Turkey wherein quotes that refer to women are extracted from the public speeches of current Turkish politicians and re-presented in archeological forms that have historically celebrated male glory.

In 2014, the collection of quotes were formed into 10 writing stones, Monument I, visually drawing from Orkhon Inscriptions: bilingually inscribed Turkic artifacts erected to glorify 8th Century Göktürk Princes.

My family, and the practices of women in my family, are things that I hold very dear to my heart; these small bits of ephemeral information are building blocks of larger, enduring concepts that give way to monumental work. 

Grandmother Series (Anneanne Serisi) is an intimate body of work that records my Grandmother, Neriman Aydin’s stories, dreams, obsessions, loves and traumas in objects. 

Grandmother Series is comprised of small scale, simple and domestic materials and working methods, as well as found or acquired objects and non-objects (practices, Oral histories, prayers.) I sculpt these physical and abstract artifacts into my work as research “data”, the meaning of which I have expanded to include objects that have gained specific significance through experience. When worn to a funeral, a piece of black cloth is elevated to a signifier of time; stones and fruit pits my grandmother brings back from a pilgrimage to Mecca into that of faith; pricked into drywall, sewing needles become documentations of waiting. I build these objects into the series to widen in space and solidify in time the active states of such object’s fleeting stories.