İlgen Arzık, 1980

İlgen Arzık’s practice is grounded in an experimental approach that centers on the transitions between photography and painting, and the fluid relationship the two mediums establish with one another. A painter by training who explores the possibilities of the photographic darkroom, Arzık combines photogram and contact-print techniques with physical interventions such as scratching, carving, and folding photographic paper. Painterly tools such as watercolor, ink, oil paint, stencil, and collage also accompany this process. Embracing chance, these physical and chemical manipulations blur the boundaries between mediums while questioning photography’s presumed direct relationship with reality. In her work, Arzık brings together personal experiences with political and social themes such as militarism, everyday violence, masculinity, the climate crisis, and issues of visibility. The ghostly figures, oblique narratives, and chaotic arrangements that populate her dystopian scenes probe the widening distance between reality and representation.

Arzık’s large-scale photograms investigate social ruptures, moments of escape and collapse, and the invisible mechanisms of pressure, all through the lens of individual stories. Her work “Escape” reminds us of the boundary ridden nature of the desire for freedom, and that freedom is always experienced within a frame. Hence, Arzık’s dystopian compositions draw the viewer into a multilayered space where societal fractures intersect with personal experience.