Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023; BA Photography
Research is the ground for exploring the world. My research paper serves as a guide in the sensorial and caring experience of the world around us as. Written in stages in which patients enter and experience the sensory room, the transition from history to the future opens space for discussion and implementation of observed practices in individual realities.
The beginning chapters introduce radical movements in psychiatry while outlining the historical formation of disability as a social issue. Discussion around illness and disability is observed trough political and philosophical frame. Historical examples provide insight into how the space of the institution itself can re-shape into a progressing form, how the discussion about institutionalised people is de-stigmatised once the closed system of a hospital or an asylum opens to its surrounding environment, and how this can affect the position of healthcare, psychiatry specifically, on the level of a state.
The chapters bring forward current knowledge around body memory and studies around sensory treatments in institutionalized settings. In this chapters, the body is not solely observed in the setting of a hospital or asylum, but brought in the context of perceiving the body as a social and cultural object.
Short poetic digressions are moments of personal reflection, automatic writing that reminds me of moments when I saw the necessity to provide alternative models of care.
The paper contains interviews and transcriptions of conversations I had with my commissioners. Through conversations with medical workers and artists, I reflected upon the current state of care provisions, ranging from institutional care to self-care. The dialogues show sensibility and understanding that a shift in healthcare towards the re-humanization of the ill is needed.
Written in-between moments of working with materials in the workshop settings, research has acted as
Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2022
BA Interactive Media Design
After four years of studying art and technology in The Netherlands and having my own experience in search of an internship within the gaming industry, I came to realize problems that I saw in my earlier years with my mother were not limited to Turkey, and that it is a much bigger problem which spans worldwide. In this light of realizations, I decided to put together this thesis which will explore women’s role in the gaming industry with a focus on my own passion in story driven games.
Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023
Photography
In this research paper I aim to verbalize methods of working when portraying other people in order to find out how I want to tell the stories of people living in different social contexts than my own, through the realm of documentary making, in an honest and ethically justifiable way. My research consists of analyzing relevant aspects of the history of documentary photography over the last century. Through the work of artists like Dorothea Lange, Robert Capa, Nan Goldin & Susan Meiselas, a timeline is mapped out in which I recognize the role of the Western perspective and the changing dynamics within the domain of visual representation. Secondly, I make comparisons with the use of two case studies from the Netherlands. I describe elements of and reflect on the work of photographers Jan Hoek and Jan Dirk van der Burg, with both of whom I share an arguably similar background. By doing so, I counter their practices while verbalizing a way of working for myself. Lastly, the research done for the paper contains the tracing of my past, and the path that I have walked to come to this point. With the recognition of the privileges in my background, I have been able to better position myself as a photographer.
This work focuses on the position of the blow-in, or outsider in Irish society. From this, the text discusses Irish, queer and white guilt in isolated community dynamics. Questioning the acts of group assimilation, ascension and self-annihilation all through poetics.
Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023
B.A. Fine Arts
In this research I probe the insides of the camera as a surveillant apparatus. I argue that a camera is not a passive object but rather an entity with agency in space. Questions will come up such as what is the existential condition of the camera? Has it seen too much? How does it feel to roll for eternity in hopes of witnessing an event which might take place over a single frame? Is this obsessive drive materialized as a black dome in a state of despair or bliss? What will be the view from the end of times when the last camera stands still? If the eye-lens is a mediator between exterior and interior and it has agency in our imaging of reality, but cameras and computer vision don’t really sense in images, what are we gazing at and what are they gazing at?
We will get started by coming up with definitions, dissecting the camera apparatus, addressing its correlations with our eyes, tracing a paralel between surveillance and religion in chapter 1. Chapter 2 sharpens the foreground with New Materialist and Media Archeological lens – a sort of macro into its circuits and raw materials. Rotating the focus ring to chapter 3, our eyes turn to a collection of letters addressed to different surveillance cameras I have encountered. Chapter 4 removes its lens, the camera laid bare to a high-powered laser as a novel practice of intra-action. A telescope lens is then attached to the camera in Chapter 5, and we’ll look far into the edges of our time. Finally, a global shutter attemps to scan the whole image with concluding remarks, and fails.
Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2022
BA Photography
The thesis seeks to analyze a type of negative reasoning that may arise during specific gay intimate encounters. It does so by relating it to absurdism, failure, rejection and the unimaginable. In order to get there, the paper focuses on the power of affects as incongruent impulses that can lead to unexpected situations. t also addresses the moments after this reasoning, when those intense impulses need a specific management. The research is also supported by an autofictional story that tries to question the inert and, in occasions, disappointing qualities of academic knowledge.
