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.

Before Gezi, Istanbul’s queer nightlife was a visible space of existence and togetherness. The city’s streets, clubs, and homes became stages for desire, friendship, and resistance. The camera acted as both witness and participant within this shared world.

After Gezi, as the political climate hardened and public space contracted, the home became a refuge, almost a sanctuary. Silence reshaped the ways one could express themselves; grief seeped into the everyday as a form of invisible resistance.

The unexpected losses I experienced in 2015 severed my connection to the archive for several years. Until 2019, I could not bring myself to look at the photographs; returning to the past was something I avoided, and yet eventually had to confront. Revisiting the years I shared with friends who are no longer alive was painful, but this confrontation transformed the meaning of the archive. Reviewing and reorganizing all 45,000 images took nearly three years, during which the foundation of the project took shape.

Returning to the archive in 2019 became a way of facing both my past and myself. Moving through the images opened paths toward constructing a new narrative in the space that loss had left behind.

In 2024, the project was exhibited alongside a cardboard model of an Istanbul home I built, transforming the space into a house of memory suspended between dream and recollection.

In Dreams, We Unite holds the fragility, resilience, and subtle transformations of queer everyday life. Each frame summons what is suppressed, existing on the thin line between dream and reality. The archive is reimagined as a site of healing; from the joy of the past, an imagination for the future emerges.

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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?

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.

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.
Projects
Günce