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.