The image has to be charged with a strong feeling. It has to have some kind of complex atmosphere and not tell a direct story. It’s also always better when there is a superficial banality to it, masking the deeper meaning.

There are a couple of Instagram and WhatsApp groups I’m in, and every morning after breakfast, I’m on my phone for a bit to go through what people shared. There’s always something funny there.

I rarely think about the audience. I am the initial audience for the work I make, and as long as I feel comfortable, I can go through with it. Of course, there is a decency, or maybe a tastefulness, that I look for, but it’s never a conceptual rule about certain topics.

I’ve also worked with assistants and had certain works produced by different fabricators. The series of paintings made in Dafen was produced by one of these fabricators, and I was very pleased with the results.

The way I worked was that I would send the studio in Dafen images I had made in Photoshop, and they would paint them as best they could and send them back to me. I would then stretch the canvases in my studio in Istanbul and, if necessary, add more layers, edit certain areas, paint over some parts, and finish the works.

I used them as complex underpaintings, although sometimes I simply left them exactly as they came from China.

It definitely made them more interesting. One of the main ideas behind the series was this blurred concept of authorship, so I never really thought of them as “mine” but more like I was mimicking some kind of online persona or reflecting something about my experience of being online.

I wanted the installation to simulate an out-of-body, post-death mise-en-scène. As viewers entered the gallery space, the first thing they would notice was themselves on an iPad displaying a live feed from an IP camera mounted on the ceiling, with a slight delay. In my mind, this imitated the experience of entering a kind of purgatory.

I feel like they are the ultimate sources of gossip. When people who have known each other for a long time communicate, conversations often become more honest, idiosyncratic, and inventive than those found in public settings. The resulting exchanges can be chaotic, humorous, and deeply revealing, producing a special kind of authenticity.

It definitely is a reflection of me in many ways, but I don’t think of it as a direct self-portrait. The figure operates more as a composite character, shaped by personal observations, emotions, and behaviours that I recognise both in myself and in the wider culture around me. At times, certain traits are deliberately exaggerated, allowing the figure to become a vehicle for states of anxiety, exhaustion, or self-destruction that might otherwise be difficult to articulate. In that sense, it exists somewhere between autobiography and collective portraiture, reflecting not only my own experience but also the clusterfuck of a generation navigating contemporary life.

I’ve always been interested in the word "normal" because it reveals how relational reality really is. What we consider normal is rarely an objective condition; it is something produced through comparison, repetition, and collective agreement.

After the internet, and especially through social media, our sense of normality is increasingly shaped by platforms that constantly measure and rank behaviour. Surveillance has become decentralised. We watch each other, and we watch ourselves. Likes, views, shares, and follower counts function as a continuous public scorecard, signalling whether our appearance, opinions, or lifestyles are being validated or not.

In many ways, this reflects what some theorists describe as techno-feudalism, where a small number of digital platforms own the spaces in which social life takes place and extract value from our attention, relationships, and self-expression. Within these systems, normality is no longer just a social category; it becomes something algorithmically produced and reinforced. What appears normal is often simply what is most visible or most rewarded.

I remember getting my first PC and playing Sanitarium, watching South Park for the first time, listening to Tupac and The Prodigy, and seeing The Matrix on the big screen. Despite all the dystopian narratives in Western pop culture, it felt like a time of utopian optimism about the future. There was a widespread belief that globalism would be beneficial for the planet, both economically and socially, and that it would lead us into a technological revolution. That felt like the dominant worldview at the time.

I just had a chance to listen to a couple of messages before I flew back to London, and the one that stayed with me was a weird little poem.