ÖZLEM ALTIN

Özlem Altın’s research focuses on the articulations between inanimate body parts and the artefact in motion. Her collages and photographic constellations investigate compatibilities, translations and adaptations between the human body, animal and vegetal parts, cultural artefacts and language. As she cuts, conceals, reproduces and paints over layers of archival imagery, the interplay between receding figures and a protruding background underlines a state of in-betweenness positioning every element in a dynamic tension between potentiality and actuality. 

Constituting an archive of her own photographs and found images, including other artists’ works and material from museum collections, Özlem Altın selectively activates imagery through collages, photographs and painting. Abolishing any hierarchies within the source material, she develops a highly associative visual semantic that focuses on gestures as abstractions.

Altın’s contouring of images with ink and paint at once isolates fragments - human arms and hands, plants and herons, monsters and ghostly figures - from their original context, and re-animates them in a new mythological vocabulary that dissolves the border between the organic and the artifact, the spectral and the physical. Distinctly hand painted, these marks enact an encounter between the indexicality of photographic capture and the somatic qualities associated with touch. 

Alongside exhibition contexts, the book form is integral to Altın’s research as a spatial and temporal medium where her work unfolds. Having founded Orient Press as a publishing platform in Berlin in 2007, she has created and disseminated artist books since early stages of her practice, including  Dance (Camera Austria, 2017); Umbra (2010); Survival Of An Idea (2008); The Primitive Mentality (2007).  

Özlem Altın (b. 1977, Goch, Germany) lives and works in Berlin. 

Altın studied at the ArtEZ Hogeschool voor de Kunsten in Arnhem from 2000 to 2003 and at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam between 2004 and 2006. Recent solo exhibitions include Lens, Merano Arte (Meran, 2019); Processing, Camera Austria, (Graz, 2017); Untitled (Touch or Melancholy), Lentos, (Linz, 2016); No story, no, Witte de With, (Rotterdam, 2015). Her work has been included in important group shows such as The Milk of Dreams, 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia (2022); Tongues of Time, Villa Romana, (Florence, 2021); Companion Pieces: New Photography 2020, MoMA online (2020); Part of the Labyrinth, Göteburg International Biennial for Contemporary Art (Gothenburg, 2019); The Seventh Continent, 16th Istanbul Biennial (2019); We don't need another hero, 10th Berlin Biennale (2018); Beyond Words, 4th Mardin Biennial (2018); Cosmology of the Boundless, Museion Bolzano (2017). Özlem Altın was the recipient of Stiftung Kunstfonds’ Work Grant in 2022 and a Fellow at the Villa Romana, Florence, in 2020. In 2023 she was awarded by the city of Berlin, the Hannah Höch Forderpreis and a solo exhibition to be held at Berlinische Galerie in 2024.