Cereyan

“Cereyan” comes from Persian and means flow, occurrence, coming into being; its root cer refers to a cycle and continuous movement. This series makes visible the currents of the dark periods that have recurred within me for years—my losses and my search for healing. Comprising around 120 photographs and still ongoing, it examines how memory is formed, how forgetting becomes possible, and where and how remembering begins.

My photographic practice started within the rhythm of queer nightlife, but over time the shadows behind the lights aligned with the darkness I carried inside, and my gaze turned inward. While preparing for my first solo exhibition, I began gathering the images I could not place anywhere in a folder I called “disappearance.” As running dogs, solitary figures, fallen trees, and exhausted bodies accumulated, a buried childhood memory surfaced: when I was five, during a family visit to the village, my family left me behind because they assumed I was in the other car. The loneliness and abandonment I felt in that moment stayed with me for years—until it resurfaced through these images.

The first selection revealed the traces of a little girl’s loneliness and sense of rootlessness. The second emerged from the photographs I took twenty years later, when I left my family and moved to Istanbul for university, uncovering further echoes of separation, grief, and the fear of being left behind. Two archives created nearly two decades apart hold the shared flow of different ruptures and take me back to the same questions: Where is home? How does one return?

I enriched this project during an artist residency in Kirte, a village shaped by population-exchange migrants like my own family. My personal experience of solitude intertwined with the migration stories I listened to there, reveals how individual memory folds into collective history. In this way, an intimate emotional landscape expanded into a broader narrative of displacement and belonging.

The images move between fragility and unease; they layer like the strata of memory itself. Cereyan: The Common Cuckoo makes visible the delicate layers of belonging shaped through personal loss and asks a simple but enduring question: After a loss, is it possible to return home — to exist again?

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An Apartment in Şişli

An Apartment in Şişli is a photographic series I produced in Şişli, in the center of Istanbul (adjacent to Taksim; a corridor where different faiths and cultures have lived side by side for centuries). The title is taken from the opening of the 1933 operetta Lüküs Hayat. For me this reference is not nostalgia; it is a point of departure for questioning how the promise of early modernity persists today—and for whom it is constructed. The series moves through the distance between the polished image of Şişli celebrated in the song and the Şişli of the present, keeping one question alive: Who lives in Şişli now, who is displaced, and who gets to stay?

In Dreams, We Unite

The title In Dreams, We Unite is taken from Zeki Müren’s song of the same name. As an iconic performer who challenged gender norms and carried early traces of queer aesthetics onto the Turkish stage, Müren holds a special place in the emotional memory of this project. In Dreams, We Unite is a visual narrative that traces the intersections of personal and collective memory, and the imprints of loss, intimacy, and healing. Emerging from an archive of nearly 45,000 photographs taken between 2007 and 2023, the project carries the echoes of two distinct periods: the free and exuberant public life of the pre-Gezi years, and the quiet, introspective fragility of the years that followed.

FAMILY

FAMILY (2012) is a portrait series shaped through visits to the homes of my friends who live with their animals. Rather than reducing the concept of family to a single definition, the work opens it up to reflection through the relational forms produced by cohabitation, everyday closeness, and the bonds we build. People, animals, and personal objects appear side by side, because “family” often becomes visible not through bloodlines, but through shared space and the rhythm of a life lived together. In this sense, FAMILY looks at shifting narratives of family and the ways the idea of the “nuclear family” expands and transforms.
Projects
Günce