deniz gul

‘’Line confined in narrative’’ and ‘’Line exhausted by line’’

- Deniz Gül 2025

Limited edition hard ground etching and monotype on Hahnemühle 350 gsm

Paper size: 45x53.5 cm

Image size: 21x29.5 cm

Edition of 20 + 2 A.P. + 3 P.P Price: €200

The titles of this series are: “Lineconfined in Narrative” and “Line Exhausted by Line”.

These works can be read within the context of my conceptual practice. In this process, where the action is etching and the visual output is an image, I also wanted to work with reference images. It is a fact that I am not an artist who constructs narratives by following a design; rather, I have an approach that explores the limits of materials and thinks abstractly. For a long time, I have been researching what writing actually means. These two images are a projection of the appearance that emerges from the difference in time and wear between a patch applied when concrete road cracks and the moment it meets the structure. The patch shines like writing on the road under sunlight.

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Highness, exhibition view at Bozlu Art Project

55x55x110 cm refrigrator unit coated in brass, clear ice, display glass

2019-2025

exhibition view at Bozlu Art Project, on view until end of March

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This piece was first produced by Kevser Guler’s Flesh and Bone exhibition in 2019 by Ilhami Usta and Gokhan. Ibrahim Cansizoglu, when becoming the director of Bozlu Art Project, wanted to install it again. And so we pull the plug in and realize the machine is working perfectly. The ice is displayed in a vitrine glass thus is not resistant to temperature change of the venue even though it is being cooled by the copper machine. Thus it melts, and the liquid is supplied back to the room by a heater that boils the liquid form.

Highness is completely a self sufficient ecosystem, so when visiting please be prepared for what the day brings; sometimes the machine breaks down, cannot sustain the cooler for the environ, or sometimes the ice melts, sometimes the machine is just stressed and gives out cringy sounds. The work is in constant change, working, or not working!

Branches

BY HG MASTERS

Words can be “#pointless #low #unprecedented #confession #relief #sweat [. . .] ”; these particular ones linked to other websites from the homepage of hashwords.net, a continuously updated index of 2,753 hashtagged words chosen by Deniz Gül, for which an algorithm trawls 75,000 online news sites to find examples of their latest usage. The web platform, #Words (2021), points to the artist’s abiding interests in “how to monitor the involvement and effects of words in periods of economic, ecological, and social crisis.” Run for two-months until June 13, #Words is a parallel project to Gül’s multi-part exhibition “Scratch and Surface,” which spanned the spaces of SALT Galata, in Istanbul, as part of SALT’s yearlong Sequential program.

BY MATT A. HANSON

 ArtAsiaPacific March 2024

Through a half-open door, Deniz Gül’s studio conveys the essence of space as the arch-material of all things. An inner-city dwelling amid the globalized hustle of downtown Istanbul, it is less a home than a shelter that gives life meaning and fosters creative inquiry. Working beside the same monstera plant for the last decade, next to a desk, a sofa, and a mattress, and within eyeshot of a minaret and Italianate apartments, Gül approaches the symbioses of space and material through interpersonal dialogue, embodying the potency of emptiness as grounds for acts of production and installation, speculation, and recollection. Theirs is the art of emphasizing the unapparent and abstracting noetic and spatial absences with investigatory wit into orders of literary and postmodern female-centric constructivism. Later that day, when a friend drops by and inquires after Gül’s work, they reply “empty,” with a characteristic smile, somewhere between philosophic solemnity and comic bewilderment. 

notonlypublications is a publishing platform founded in 2020 by artist Deniz Gül with the aim of nurturing dialogue between contemporary art, poetry and experimental writing through printed and online publications

Site specific installation

Casted Terracotta Floor, 150 sq. mt. 2024, İzmir

Kesme Cam | Cut Glass, 2011 [2023] 

Riva dekor | decor 124 pieces of glass, hand cut. 

234 x 538 x 1.5 cm

2023 Arter Koleksiyonu | Arter Collection

BLUE PASSAGE

Sound installation, Imalathane, 2022

Blue automotive pain, galvanized electrical cable tray, ultrasonic sensors, speaker, sound: labor strike at the AKP Automative factory located in the Hasanaga Industrial Region Nilufer/Bursa led by Turkish Metal Union Osmangazi branch, February 2021

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MAVİ GEÇİT

Ses yerleştirme, İmalathane, 2022

The winners of the Casa Wabi / ArtReview residency prize have been announced.

Deniz Gül from Turkey, Dolores Furtado from Argentina and Melania Toma from Italy will be going to Oaxaca in Mexico to stay at Casa Wabi, an artist residency and community arts centre founded by the artist Bosco Sodi in 2014.

Gül makes sculpture assemblages out of everyday objects and organic materials. Among the materials the frequently returns to is milk, plaster, acid, water, rice, sugar, wood and glass. She says that ‘malfunctioning, decaying, metamorphosing are important physical aspects of my sculptural work, and it is crucial for the artwork to have a life of its own’. At the beachside Casa Wabi she plans to ask members of the local community to provide an object that interests them and workshop potential sculptures from that starting point. ‘We will find out its magic!’ she says. ‘How does sugar meet with water… how can a shoe be a pot, how can a cream paste freeze?’ 

Toma plans to work within the communities around the lagoon de Cachaua and in Villa de Tututepec area, to develop a collective weaving project, producing fishing nets. ‘El Zapotalito reflects the context of the Parque Nacional Lagunas de Chacahua, which is very complex under different aspects: culturally for the strong presence of afro, mixtecos and chatinos roots, and socially for the high level of marginalization, and also for the fragile ecosystem that surround the lagoon’, the Italian London-based artist says. ‘In these contexts, these communities are microcosms that by their completeness give the opportunity to deal with themes linked to the wider national Mexican context such as machismo, mestizaje, environmental racism, fishing, and first of all the female organisation.’ 

Lecture presentation at Glossary of Common Knowledge, 2021 - documentation; MG+MSUM, Valand Academy, 15' 36", 12 May 2021.