My recent works are oracles of wreckage—prophecies assembled from collapse. They accumulate, erode, rebuild, and break apart. They are browser windows layered on top of each other, half-loaded images, error messages in paint. A dumpster full of abandoned fragments, half-legible symbols, things pulled out and repurposed.

I work with painting as an unstable process, where resolution—if it comes—emerges from instability. Each surface holds onto ghosts of previous decisions, scraped and wiped away, only for another image to push through. The work absorbs material history—grime, touch, layers of paint, a surface that has lived through things.

There is a shamanistic quality to the way meaning emerges from disorder. I let the work arrange itself, allowing random elements to fall into patterns that feel charged, prophetic, or barely holding together. Like a divination system gone wrong, the images emerge through accident and intention, contradiction and refusal.

I draw from Irk Bitig, an ancient Turkic divination text, as a personal methodology. It offers a system for interpreting chance, a way to read signs where none were meant to be. Meaning isn’t something to be found—it’s something to unearth, struggle with, discard, and rediscover.

A painting, for me, is an unstable record of process, a site of layered gestures and interruptions. It’s a haunted object that refuses to settle, something worked, abandoned, and revived until it takes on a life of its own.

Irk Bitig – A Catalogue of Omens is a divination machine gone wrong. Pneumatic pumps, a Raspberry Pi, AI-generated voices, and four concrete containers filled with camel milk form a dysfunctional oracle, spitting out prophecies with the mechanical indifference of an error-prone fortune teller.

Inspired by Irk Bitig (Book of Omens), a 9th-century Turkic divination manual, the piece distorts an ancient system of chance and interpretation. In the original text, omens were determined by throwing three four-sided sticks, producing a numbered sequence that corresponded to a specific prophecy. Here, bubbling milk replaces the sticks. A Python script logs the last three containers that bubbled before a red button is pressed, triggering an AI-generated Turkish voice to deliver an omen in heavily accented English.

Developed during my 2023–24 Media Arts Scholarship at the Centre for Art Tapes in Kjipuktuk/Halifax, Irk Bitig – A Catalogue of Omens collapses the distance between ancient ritual and modern algorithmic randomness. It is less a revival of lost knowledge than an unstable translation—across time, technology, and material. Meaning appears, mutates, and dissolves. The installation is a wreckage site of cultural memory, a system whose logic is constantly slipping out of reach.

Market is a study in mutation. A cut sausage, simple and blunt, fractures and reforms across the series—hacked into its component parts, flattened into ovals, splattered against white, stacked into rectangles, stretched into stripes. It slips between recognition and abstraction, an object shifting under pressure. Thick and thin paint push against each other, irony and sincerity blur, expressive gesture is both performed and undermined.

Expressionist brushwork is confined to precise zones—the “meat” of the painting—turning painterly flourish into something fixed, almost diagrammatic. In Market, the sausage is a deadpan allegory: a stand-in for aesthetic appetites, for masculine posturing, for the uneasy history of art as a commodity.

The Market series is part of Certain Objects, a larger body of work supported by a Project Grant from the Canada Council for the Arts.

Atilla’s Mirror Shop is an anti-monument. A fragmentary recreation of my late uncle’s store in Izmir, it exists as an itinerant, ever-changing installation—built from memory, distorted by time. The project first took shape in 2018 during a three-month residency at the International Studio & Curatorial Program in Brooklyn and has since surfaced in different forms across Regina, Athens, Dartmouth, Crete, and Keffalonia.

Each iteration is a shifting constellation of vintage mirrors, distorted photographs, and an ambient soundscape pulled from the streets of Izmir and the various cities where the project has been staged. The mirrors reflect, refract, and fragment the space, turning it into a site of self-recognition and disappearance. The sound archive grows with every installation—hours of field recordings loop through the space, layering past and present, collapsing distance.

The shop is gone, but Atilla’s Mirror Shop lingers—its logic is fluid, unstable, more echo than reconstruction. It is an immersive environment conjured from incomplete memories, an ongoing conversation about inheritance, displacement, and the desire to see oneself reflected. A collaboration with my partner, Erica Mendritzki, my parents, and my extended family in Turkey, it remains, in a way, a family business.

Each panel in this series depicts a rusty square etching plate in various stages of disintegration, floating against a black void. The sequence begins with mostly intact plates, then moves toward increasing fragmentation—eaten away by oxidation, reduced to traces of their former solidity. These are not pristine objects; they are tools of production, marked by use, corrosion, and time.

As in my lithograph series, I am drawn to turning a process of image-making into the subject of painting itself. These plates were never meant to be images—just means to an end—but here they become the focus, their deterioration captured in paint. I see them as both a nod to once-radical ideas like Malevich’s Black Square and a quiet assertion that all radicalism is temporary. What was once new will break down, fade, and return to raw material.

The Plates series is part of a larger body of work titled Certain Objects, supported by a Project Grant from the Canada Council for the Arts.

These paintings take stone lithography as subject, but also as a disappearing act. Litho stones—once the backbone of industrial print shops—are now near extinction, scraped down with each new image, ground closer to nothing. The process is one of erasure.

Painting, on the other hand, refuses to die. Declared obsolete for decades, it carries on without risk of depletion. In the studio, I build my stones back up, layer by layer, on canvas—no quarry, no grinding, no loss. The paintings don’t just depict litho stones; like the sausages in Market, they double as stand-ins for themselves, thick with paint, their surfaces solid but unstable.

This series is about what vanishes and what persists, about use and obsolescence, about making something just to wear it down.

The Stones series is part of Certain Objects, supported by a Project Grant from the Canada Council for the Arts.

Carrés et paysans est un projet pictural inspiré par les revirements radicaux de Kazimir Malevitch—son saut vers l’abstraction, puis son retour inattendu à la figuration. Le travail s’articule autour de deux séries parallèles : une suite de plaques métalliques carrées rouillées et en décomposition, et un ensemble de peintures et dessins disséquant Tête de paysan (1928–30) de Malevitch.

Cette peinture étrange et maladroite—réalisée dix-sept ans après Carré noir—est devenue pour moi un guide pour surmonter l’ennui, le nihilisme et le blocage artistique. C’est une leçon de contradiction : rigide mais expressive, figurative mais dépourvue d’individualité. Mes peintures la déconstruisent, examinent sa structure et la réassemblent en quelque chose de nouveau.

L’exposition a été présentée à La Maison des artistes visuels francophones du 1ᵉʳ mai au 14 avril 2018. Paysans et Carrésest un projet en cours, soutenu par une bourse individuelle du Winnipeg Arts Council et une bourse Recherche-Création du Manitoba Arts Council.

Peasants and Squares is a painting project driven by Kazimir Malevich’s radical shifts—his leap into abstraction, then his unexpected return to figuration. The work centers on two parallel bodies: a series of rusty, disintegrating square metal plates and a group of paintings and drawings dissecting Malevich’s Head of a Peasant (1928–30).

This peculiar, stilted painting—made seventeen years after the Black Square—has become my personal guide to pushing through boredom, nihilism, and artist’s block. It’s an object lesson in contradiction: rigid yet expressive, figurative yet stripped of individuality. My paintings pull it apart, examine its structure, and reassemble it into something new.

The exhibition was on view at La Maison des artistes visuels francophones from May 1 to April 14, 2018. Peasants and Squares is an ongoing project, supported by an Individual Artist Grant from the Winnipeg Arts Council and a Research/Creation grant from the Manitoba Arts Council

Etc. is a section for orphan paintings and dead ends.

Atilla’s Mirror Shop is an installation built from echoes—photographs, ambient sounds, and found objects arranged like traces of a place that no longer exists. This iteration was installed at The Lakkos Project in Heraklion, Crete, during a residency in the summer of 2019. The project began at the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) in Brooklyn, where I first reconstructed fragments of my late uncle Atilla’s mirror shop in Izmir. In Lakkos, the work expanded, absorbing the space’s own haunted histories.

Lakkos was once a dense, chaotic underworld—a hub for musicians, hustlers, and exiles. The forced population exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1923 brought refugees from Asia Minor, layering new voices into the streets. Now, the neighborhood is mostly emptied out, its buildings sun-bleached and crumbling. The residency occupied two historic Turkish buildings, barely held together by time. Walls collapsed under the impact of nails, dust settled as fast as it was swept, and light barely reached the installation.

The work blurred into the space—photographs from the Izmir shop layered onto flaking plaster, an audio loop of Izmir street noise filling abandoned rooms. The installation itself felt unstable, shifting under the weight of its own history. My grandfather, born in Thessaloniki, was one of many displaced by the same political forces that shaped Lakkos. This project isn’t about preservation. It’s wreckage, distortion, a half-formed reflection of something both gone and still present, flickering in and out of sight.