Ozlem Altin

Özlem Altin’s works are usually installations. Working from a personal collection of pictures, she associatively contrasts the commonalities and contradictions of the images used. She is particularly interested in concepts of the body. Faces, as special features of the body’s identity, are usually covered and disguised. This renders people interchangeable, makes them lose their specific personal quality, and turns them into objects. Altin combines these assemblages of various pictures with other objects to create installations. When pictures of bodies are leant against a chair or a wall, they are not regarded as projection surfaces, but as actual objects in space. The images become objects by entering into a spatial relationship with the installation, the body and the proportions of the observer. Altin thus generates a tautological entanglement in which her works are in a constant interrelation between body and object. She creates works that position themselves in terms of the installation as objects in space, actively confronting the body of the observer.

Özlem Altın, born 1977, is a visual artist based in Berlin and a graduate of the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam (MA) and the Hoogeschool voor de Kunsten in Arnhem (BA). Selected solo shows include Cathartic ballet at Circus in Berlin (2013), Rhythm of Resemblance at Günther-Peill Foundation at the Leopold Hoesch Museum in Düren (2012) and Ianus (My memory of what happened is not what happened) at Fondazione Morra Greco in Naples (2010). Selected group shows include Non-Profit & Profit at SpazioA in Pistoia (2014), Disappear like this word at Aleksander Bruno in Warsaw (2014),Museum Off Museum at Bielefelder Kunstverein in Bielefeld (2013), Das Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts. Es kommt noch besser at Hamburger Bahnhof Museum für Gegenwart in Berlin (2013), Salon der Angst at Kunsthalle Wien in Vienna (2013), Regarding Düsseldorf 6 at KuK Monschau in Aachen (2012), the light, the shape & the body at Galerie Reinhard Hauff in Stuttgart (2011), Untitled (Evidence): From Alternative Knowledge to Counter Memories at David Roberts Art Foundation in London (2011) and based in Berlin at Atelierhaus Monbijoupark in Berlin (2011). She also founded Orient Press, Berlin.