Aslı Çavuşoğlu, 1982

Born in Istanbul in 1982, Aslı Çavuşoğlu graduated from the Cinema and Television Department of Marmara University in 2004. In her research-based practice, she explores historiography, cultural circulation, and the processes through which knowledge is produced. Working across various media, including painting, installation, video, and publishing, Çavuşoğlu investigates how knowledge and images circulate and transform over time through archives, oral narratives, and material culture. Her works question how historical narratives are constructed and how they are continually reinterpreted.

“ANNEX” is composed of 29 red neon letterforms conceived by Çavuşoğlu and designed by Özer Yalçınkaya. The work draws on slogan graffiti that the artist has documented on the walls of Istanbul for more than a decade. In developing this typeface, Çavuşoğlu takes inspiration from anti-establishment slogans such as “The only way is revolution” and “Another world is possible,” which often become illegible shortly after they are written due to interventions on the walls. She is particularly interested in how the letters of these slogans are altered by the addition of lines, circles, and triangles, gradually transforming into unrecognizable shapes. Çavuşoğlu notes that these interventions do not merely distort the letters but generate entirely new forms. In “ANNEX,” these letters that have been stripped of their original meaning and rendered abstract, come together to create a new visual narrative. Therefore, the English title of the work, “ANNEX,” is used here in the sense of “bringing under sovereignty”; it refers to the act of incorporating a new territory into an existing political domain and is directly related to the conceptual framework of the artwork. By recording this organically evolving alphabet unique to Istanbul’s walls, the artist also archives the city’s memory.