Aykan Safoğlu
Aykan Safoğlu (1984) stages interdisciplinary narrations where his longings, dreams and contradictions challenge historical time. Appropriating technical failures, Safoğlu makes intimate memory work that defies media conventions. His hybrid artistic forms fragment, reproduce, and reorient ontological questions in film, photography, and performance. The artist received his MFA in Photography from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York (2014) and holds a MA in “Art in Context” from UdK Berlin (2010). Recent solo exhibitions include Reckless at Kulturhaus Obere Stube (2024), Taurus at Pilot, Vienna (2023), Recess at Salt Galata, Istanbul (2022), Ebbe/Flut at Coalmine, Winterthur (2022), and I’ll Be Your Mirror at Kunstverein Göttingen (2021). His work was also included in notable exhibition formats, such as Les Rencontres d’Arles (2021), the 39th EVA International (2021), VIDEONALE.18 (2021), and the 11th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art (2020). Recipient of the Grand Prize of the City of Oberhausen at the 59thInternational Short Film Festival Oberhausen (2013) and the Birgit Jürgenssen Prize (2021), Safoğlu holds a PhD in Practice from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (2025). The artist lives and works in Vienna.
ROSETTE (ROSE WINDOW)
2024
print on foil mounted on acrylic glass
Courtesy of the artist
Rosette (Rose Window) is a giant puzzle laid out, partially complete, on the floor. It pieces together references and histories connecting Turkey, Germany, and the wider context of Middle East Europe. The image is of the waiting hall of the Sirkeci railway terminus in Istanbul. Designed by the German architect August Jasmund toward the end of the 19th century, the building was the Eastern terminus of the Orient Express. In the 1960s, following the recruitment agreement between the Federal Republic of Germany and Turkey, the station became the point of departure for many migrant workers from Turkey on their journey to Germany. The window, and building, project a German, Orientalist view on the visual language of the Middle East, especially the Ottoman Empire.
1991
2026
UV-print on cardboard
150 × 150 cm
Courtesy the artist
1991 by Aykan Safoğlu (b. 1984, Istanbul) is a puzzle composed from wayward reproductions of the artist’s own drawings, childhood photographs, and rubbings, scattered across the floor like a mosaic in ruins.
The piece takes its title from the year a beluga whale known as Tichka escaped a Soviet military facility in Crimea during a storm, just months before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Swimming through the Black Sea into Turkish territory, the whale reached the town of Gerze in early 1992, where it was renamed Aydın (bright), and embraced by the local community. Recaptured and returned to a makeshift oceanarium in Ukraine, Aydın later escaped again, making his way back to Gerze. Scientists, military authorities, journalists, and villagers projected competing narratives onto the animal, each attempting to define its belonging within newly shifting geopolitical realities, ultimately turning it into a media sensation.
Safoğlu’s scattered images evoke both childhood play and archaeological fragments, referring to pebble mosaics from antiquity unearthed across the Anatolian region, where images survive only as partial constellations. 1991 becomes less an image than a field of negotiation – where interlacing personal memory and geopolitical rupture, it holds ideas of broken childhood memories and their relation to macro-histories, inviting viewers to imagine what lies beneath the surface.
Across film, photography, and performance, Safoğlu assembles intimate archives that translate, pixelate, and fragment ontological questions. In an attempt to undo his own migrant image archive, the artist shreds memory into pieces that resist being put together into a singular narrative. Dispersal becomes a method of disruption and survival, reworking the image of the self as inherently incomplete and mediated.
Aykan Safoğlu participated in the Kyiv Biennial 2025 – Near East Far West (03.10.25–08.01.26) at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw.