Yerine / In Lieu, 2020-2022
Handmade paper with black cord and printed sentences from personal notes taken after Suruç and Ankara bombings

In Lieu features “documents” ie. letter-size sheets of handmade paper with embedded marks that evoke traces of text. This series emerged in response to the 2015 Suruç and Ankara bombings in Turkey, which claimed the lives of many young civilians gathered in peaceful protest. These events marked a sharp turn toward a securitarian state, where collective grief and dissent were increasingly met with suppression. I felt unable to speak or write about these bombings in any way that made sense, and found myself left with fragmented expressions: unfinished email drafts, voice recordings, notes, and unsent social media posts that remained unseen.This sense of fragmentation mirrored the broader political rupture that followed. I twisted these personal notes into a cordage and embedded them into paper fibres, producing these three works that later evolved into a larger series.

This series of three works involving my personal notes, twisted into cording and embedded in paper, later evolved into a larger series that examine the unstable nature of language.

Related works: In Lieu 2021-2022