"You Have a Place Above My Head” Series, 2019 - on going

Using contemporary terminology, the series “You Have a Place Above My Head,” which the artist has been developing since 2019, explores the potential sexuality of everyday objects discovered during walks in Istanbul. The series has been showcased in prominent platforms including Vogue Italia Online (2020), Altiba-9 International Art Magazine, ArtsLibris Fair Barcelona (2021), ARCOMadrid, ARCOLisboa, GUP Magazine Fresh Eyes Talent Book, the Rotterdam Kahmann Gallery’s "New European Photography" group show, and the “The Weight of the World” group show at Kasa Gallery, curated by Misal Adnan Yıldız. In 2022, it was featured in the Nilufer Municipality group show “Look Up, the Starry Horizons of a Defined Geography,” curated by Yekhan Pınarlıgil, and participated in the Republic of Albania International FOKUS awards competition. As of 2024, some images from the series have been selected by curator Çağla İlk for the visual campaign of Munich Kammerspiele.

Historically associated with the pictorial representation of everyday life within domestic interiors, genre painting serves as a conceptual point of departure for this series. The work also draws linguistic resonance from the Turkish expression “You Have a Place Above My Head,” a phrase that reflects the cultural ritual of hospitality while subtly revealing the negotiations of proximity, hierarchy, and belonging embedded in private space.
 
Departing from the traditional alignment of domestic imagery with women’s roles and the often invisible labour of maintaining the home, the series revisits this visual lineage through a contemporary perspective shaped by material culture and spatial displacement. Rather than focusing on bodies, the work approaches these histories through objects, tracing how social and cultural structures, particularly the gendered and often obscured conditions of domestic labour, become embedded and naturalised within material environments.
 
Objects encountered during spontaneous walks through the streets of Istanbul, often fragments of domestic life that have been displaced, discarded, or left behind, are collected and reintroduced into interior settings. This gesture of return does not restore their original function; instead, it exposes a condition of in betweenness where objects carry traces of both public circulation and private memory.
 
Through this movement between outside and inside, the works engage with broader questions of urban transformation, migration, and rupture. Istanbul, as a city shaped by continuous displacement and layered histories, becomes an implicit backdrop where objects operate as silent witnesses to processes of loss, transition, and reconfiguration.
Within the domestic space, these objects undergo a subtle yet decisive shift. What appears neutral or functional in the urban landscape becomes sensorially and symbolically charged once placed indoors. Removed from the conditions and bodies that once defined their use, they no longer fulfil their expected functions. Their suspended or disrupted utility exposes the gendered assumptions embedded within them, as well as the absent or withdrawn bodies historically assigned to activate them. In this sense, the work not only reflects on domestic labour, but also reveals how its gendered structures can be unsettled through absence, refusal, and displacement.
 
The series ultimately unfolds as an open ended reflection on domestic space as a fluid and unstable site where meanings, identities, and cultural codes are continuously negotiated, displaced, and transformed.