Deniz Gül

Often beginning the production process with text, Deniz Gül animates the resulting book or written piece by rendering it three-dimensionally in exhibition spaces that she arranges almost as if they are stages. She assigns symbolic roles to objects, charging them with the mission of storytelling. Gül is inspired by urban everyday life, architecture, and her encounters with people. She explores the influences of collective memory and also draws on personal stories. She also works with sound and investigates its healing power on humans.

“Teodara” is based on the artist’s novel Loyelow, which she wrote in 2016. Centered on a male character and his stream of consciousness, the novel tells his story along with those of imaginary characters such as Teodara, an elderly and lonesome woman of Greek origin whose house, where she lived for most of her life, has been demolished. She spent her final years in a hospital. In the exhibition space, Deniz Gül represents the monstera plant that Teodara used to grow on the balcony of her home as fragile leaves made of glass. According to Gül, the so-called Swiss cheese plant, which is frequently encountered in modernist spaces since the 1920s, constitute a reference to Turkey’s painful process of modernization. The artist points to the fragility of this process through the monstera leaves which are loaded on a junk dealer’s cart to be taken away following Teodara’s death in the novel. In this work, Deniz Gül invites the viewer to experience a space in between imagination and reality.