Ayça Telgeren, 1975

Ayça Telgeren uses diverse forms of expression including drawing, video, sculpture, installation and paper works, which she has been pursuing since 2006. The artist’s early works focus on dreams, senses, utopian universes, and imaginary heroes. While drawing on her personal life and thoughts, the artist proceeds from timeless and shared human principles. Acting on her own intuition and instincts, and taking inspiration from music and literature, the artist describes her creative process as an exploration and a journey. The abstract and concrete findings that emerge during this journey give shape to the works.

In “Corpus of Memory,” Ayça Telgeren shows us frames put together as a whole, in which we only see the hands of anonymized family members cut out from family photos at the moments they touch. Investigating the relationship between body and memory, the work reveals traces that moments of touch leave on the memory, especially in terms of body memory. Although we can tell from the small size of some hands that they belong to babies and that others are those of men or women, what is important is the uniqueness and evanescence of each moment. The touching hands bring together the artist’s precious memories. For Telgeren, who takes as her starting point a resource such as photography, which visualizes memories, it is through imaginary spaces that memory is shaped. The work is a geography of remembering into which viewers are invited to participate in the artist’s memories.