"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 defined as the pictorial representation of everyday life within domestic settings, genre painting serves as both a conceptual and historical anchor for this series. The work finds a linguistic and cultural resonance in the Turkish expression “You Have a Place Above My Head,” a phrase that encapsulates the ritual of hospitality and the subtle negotiation between self and guest within private space.
 
Departing from the convention of assigning female figures to predetermined domestic roles, the series reinterprets this representational lineage through a contemporary lens shaped by material culture and gendered spatiality. Objects encountered on the streets of Istanbul take on shifting meanings and embodied connotations when recontextualized within intimate interiors; what appears mundane in public becomes charged, fragile, or symbolically dense in private.
 
Through this transformation, everyday materiality emerges as a site for queerness, latent cultural codes, and nuanced negotiations of identity and desire. The artist employs found objects collected during spontaneous urban walks as agents of observation, translation, and transformation. Once undefined within the public sphere, these objects acquire symbolic and erotic charge when placed indoors, revealing the fluid boundaries between language, space, and cultural inscription.
 
Ultimately, the series unfolds as a quiet phenomenology of domestic transformation an inquiry into the instability of defined sexual identities and the porous continuum between the traditional and the contemporary, the visible and the felt."