Fulya Çetin, 1970

Born in 1970, Fulya Çetin graduated from the Painting Department of Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University in 1995. One of the founders of the Hafriyat Group, the artist participated in various exhibitions with the collective between 2007 and 2009. Working across different media such as drawing, photography, and video, Çetin creates visual narratives that invite viewers into her personal world. Transforming images drawn from everyday life into an emotional and intuitive visual language, she questions societal power relations through a perspective shaped by a woman’s gaze, while making visible tensions such as those between abstraction and reality, hope and despair.

In the work “The Longer The Closer,” Çetin focuses on women’s modes of existence within a male-dominated world. The artist fragments the everyday act of hair braiding, often associated with femininity, into 517 separate drawings and assembles them sequentially in a rapid rhythm, transforming them into a video through the stop-motion technique. In the video, strands of hair intertwine, braid, take shape, and grow longer, with this cycle continuously reconstituted. With each drawing, the act of drawing itself becomes a meditative repetition. For the artist, this process signals a form of healing while opening space to reflect on the political nature of the personal. In this context, repetition emerges not only as an individual experience but also as a means of producing an intuitive closeness among women, a quiet solidarity, and a shared form of knowing.