Zeynep Yılmaz

Born in Istanbul in 1999, the artist completed her BA degree in Arts, Media and Society at Leiden University with a minor in Gender and Sexuality Studies. As of 2019, she worked as a copywriter and translator, and started leaning towards curatorial practices through writing exhibition texts for surrounding artists. She began to build her practice by taking part in participatory works and performances, focusing on poetry and staging her own texts. Her works and collaborations took place in institutions such as The Royal Academy of Art The Hague, MUU Helsinki, White Box Oslo, Billytown, Kairos, Garage Gallery Prague, arthereistanbul, Instrument Inventors (iii), The Grey Space in The Middle, 400x118 ve 5533. Her poems and performance texts are published and broadcasted in local and international printed media and radio channels.

Her practice around poetry and prose, which weaves together the auditory, semantic and usage conditions of language, is based on exposing and nurturing curiosity towards the contrasts of daily life, pointing to a theory of relativity between variable contexts. She transforms her production into site-specific installations, time-specific performances and publications through autobiographical writing as a research tool.

Through her SAHA Studio process, she kept records that expand with time and space. While investigating the various contexts in which the state of being an artist meanders on personal and social levels, she focused on the potential of everyday occurrences to become the leading actor. She sought for new performative gestures through methods of resolving conflicts and dualities in our singular perspectives. She also looked at the differences in the ways in which the verbally expressed image and the visually expressed image are established. 

She has processed her practice through different methods with works titled “HAPPENING-SPEAKING”, which is an adaptation of a scene she witnessed one evening at İMÇ; “WRITING-DRAWINGCLIMBING”, which brings together the visual, literary and performative research of mountains she has been continuing since 2022; and “IMAGERY”, which deals with the vocalization of her texts.

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After long minutes, the first thing that came out of my mouth was only a “yes”. Among all the things that could have been said, all the answers that could have been given for all the things I had heard, the only thing I wanted to say, to myself, as if challenging my own mind to dozens of words, sentences and expressions, the first and only thing I said as a result of a momentary renewal of my own willpower, in meeting this new willpower, was “yes”.

The birds were lined up in a row. Or the birds in a row were lined up.

There are times when what we say and how we say it are more important than other times.

Everyone is trying to reassure me.

That since I am here now, there is nothing to worry about anymore.

Talking about myself would take me back to those rare moments of having the freedom to choose what I wanted from the shelves of a toy shop. Yet this time, I found myself talking about myself as a business that had hung a tarpaulin that read in order to serve you better.

Stop that, leave it. You are only where you are. Realizing the reality of this sometimes takes more than a sentence.

I came. I sat down. I said hello first. I resisted the urge to turn around and look. The comparison era is over. The era of encounters has begun.

A group of climbers tied to each other with a rope. Translating the action or image into the mind, then translating the mind back into the mind. Then translating the mind back into action.

Looking at myself through the eyes of different curators who constantly visit us here. One day being interesting,

one day boring and ordinary.

And while I have no problem with being both,

and while I am even investigating being both at the same time-

People are constantly carrying things from one place to another.

Things overflow every time people carry things from one place to another.

I feel an incredible happiness as I run towards you.

I think of being one being together

seems possible but not possible

because then immediately I want to get away from you.

Everything that comes my way seems familiar from somewhere else.

I resort to old techniques to keep myself cool. For example, instead of air conditioning, I compress my neck and feet with blue gels from the freezer.

It is completely unknown what I do to cool myself down from what just happened.

Sometimes, writing something (something I had thought about before), (the knowledge of its writability) comes later (becomes obvious). And if I have my hands free, I write.

It is obvious that we have to write due to memory’s intrinsic structure. It is obvious that we will not forget some things even if we do not write them, and we do not write them because we know we will not forget them. I have put before myself simpler days where I wouldn’t know what to say. I remember. Do you? Or I feel like I remember you from somewhere. Or not, I must have written it, but somewhere.

I had taken all of you out of me,

now I can make all of you live inside me.

I want to set off on a path to find something to say. When I feel sad, I wonder where I got stuck too.

Fortunately, I have friends who constantly keep my listening and understanding abilities fresh.

Two people who, without hurting anything between them, without touching each other, but just touching the area between them, and because they touch the area, knowing that they nevertheless touch each other in the most acceptable way, because they have created that area together.

The unit of the universe is energy, yet it would be nice

if we could satiate in exchange for the unknown or if we could buy nice shoes even.