Serpil Odabasi’s artistic practice moves through fragmentation, memory, silence, and the fragile spaces between personal experience and the wider human condition. Working predominantly in black and white in recent years, she has developed a visual language in which distorted figures, isolated eyes and mouths, negative space, and experimental materials become part of an ongoing search rather than fixed symbols.
Her practice has evolved significantly over time — from expressive acrylic painting and more explicitly political work to a quieter and increasingly personal visual language. For Odabasi, art is not simply a means of representation, but a space to question, resist, breathe, and continue searching.
In this interview with Naumy Design, Serpil reflects on fragmentation and human dignity, the tension between speaking and silence, the role of experimentation and accident, her experiences of belonging across different cultures, and the uncertainty that continues to shape her artistic practice.
Can you introduce yourself and tell us about your journey as an artist? When did art become a serious part of your life and creative identity?
My relationship with art really began to take shape during my university years. I remember waiting for my assignments to be finished so I could finally have the time and freedom to work on what I actually wanted to explore. That desire to make work outside of what was expected of me was probably the beginning of developing my own artistic voice.
During the years I worked as a teacher, my practice became much more serious and consistent. Teaching was an important part of my life, but alongside it I continued developing my own work and gradually began to understand art not simply as something I had studied, but as an essential part of how I think, observe, and make sense of the world.
How would you describe your artistic style and the visual language you have developed over the years?
My visual language has changed considerably over the years. During university and for some time afterwards, I worked mainly with acrylics in a more expressive style. Later, I began exploring different techniques and more specific areas of interest. There was also a period when my work became more graphic and explicitly political.
Over time, that language gradually shifted back toward self-expression. As this happened, colour began to disappear from my work, while I became increasingly interested in experimenting with different techniques and materials. For the last few years, I have worked predominantly in black and white. I don’t see these as entirely separate phases; each period has left something behind in the way I work today.
Your work often has a dark, psychological, and emotionally intense quality. Where does this atmosphere come from, and what draws you to it?
I think I am searching for the atmosphere of rupture, those moments when something breaks, shifts, or becomes unstable. There is something I am looking for in my work, although I don’t think I have fully found it yet. I often feel that I am very close to it, but the closer I get, the further away it seems to move.
Perhaps that search itself creates the psychological or darker atmosphere in my work. I am less interested in darkness as a subject in itself than in that uncertain space where something familiar begins to fracture and become something else.
Your figures often appear fragmented, distorted, or partially obscured. What does this fragmentation represent for you?
I use fragmentation as a metaphor in many different ways. Sometimes it is deeply connected to my personal history, and at other times it reflects something broader about the human condition.
Look at the street, look at people, look at what happens to human dignity. Human dignity has been repeatedly trampled in order to produce a person who obeys, submits, and learns not to question. At times it feels as though we are living in a vast, brutal jungle, constantly guarding ourselves, staying alert, struggling to trust, competing, attacking, even hurting one another while smiling.
I see this as a form of fragmentation. Under these conditions, we become divided not only from one another but also from ourselves. Sometimes a person can reach a point where they no longer fully recognize who they are.
Eyes and mouths appear repeatedly in your work, sometimes isolated or exaggerated. What do these elements symbolize for you?
Speaking, expressing an opinion, asking questions, even expressing discomfort, these have become increasingly restricted, sometimes almost impossible. Perhaps that is why mouths appear so often in my work: mouths that grow as if they are about to burst, or mouths that are exhausted, closed, and no longer able to speak.
But I don’t think anything in my work has such a fixed or definitive meaning. I don’t introduce these elements as symbols with predetermined definitions. Sometimes I recognize possible meanings only after an image has appeared repeatedly. Their meanings can shift from one work to another. In the case of the mouths, perhaps they carry something of the tension between the need to speak and the pressure to remain silent.
Black seems to play a particularly important role in your work. What does black mean to you, both visually and emotionally?
Working within a more concentrated, unified visual space makes me feel that I am getting closer to whatever it is I am searching for. I have worked extensively with colour, and perhaps I will return to it again. I don’t know.
But when I look at this particular moment, at the kinds of people we are becoming and at the world around us, I see many forms of darkness and ugliness. Of course, darkness can also be expressed through colour. For me, however, searching through a single colour, or through its tones and variations, feels more honest right now. Black is not a fixed symbol for me; it is simply the language that feels closest to what I am trying to reach at this point in my work.
Negative space and emptiness seem to be as important as the figures themselves in many of your works. How do you think about empty space when constructing an image?
I’m not even sure that I consciously think about negative space while I’m working. Sometimes it feels as though it finds its own place in the image.
But I notice when it is missing. Works in which I leave no negative space can make me feel tired when I look at them. I find myself thinking, there was no room left to breathe here. Perhaps I was that overwhelmed when I made it. Space and breath are important to me. Sometimes what is left untouched carries as much weight as what I put on the surface.
Can you describe your working process? Do you begin with a clear idea or image, or does the work reveal itself through the process?
Most of the time, an image appears in my mind and I begin by following it. But I have very rarely managed to capture it completely. There is an image that makes me think, “Yes, that’s it,” and I start working toward it, but by the time the work is finished, what I have made often feels like an apprentice to that original image in my mind. It resembles it, it has learned something from it, but it is never quite the same thing.
At other times, there is no initial image at all. I simply begin intuitively and allow the work to reveal itself through the process. Both ways of working involve searching rather than executing something I already know.
You work across different techniques and materials. How do you decide which medium is right for a particular work or idea?
I’m not sure I consciously decide. Sometimes it feels as though the image itself decides which materials it wants to continue its journey with. One thing leads to another, and the medium becomes part of discovering what the work needs rather than something I determine completely in advance.
I do have an unfinished desire to work on large-scale oil paintings, to have a painting there for a long period of time, returning to it every day, adding something, taking something away, and allowing it to develop slowly. I haven’t really had the conditions to work that way yet, so perhaps that is still waiting for me.
How important is experimentation in your practice? Are accidents or unexpected results something you welcome in the process?
Yes, I have many works that were born from accidents. One of my favourite moments is looking at something unexpected and thinking, “Oh, what a beautiful accident you are,” and then deciding to stay with it and see where it takes me. Accidents can open a direction I would never have arrived at deliberately.
Of course, not every accident is beautiful. Sometimes everything is going exactly as I want and then something unexpected creates an effect I really don’t like. Depending on the severity of the disaster, I try to work through it, or sometimes I simply destroy the piece. I suppose experimentation also means accepting both possibilities.
How have your personal experiences and the places you have lived influenced your artistic practice?
Art has often functioned as a space where I can breathe and resist. There have been many moments in my life when I have thought, “All right, this has happened. I have no idea how to get out of it, but perhaps if I keep working, I can move through it.”
We are actually very fragile. Against systems, against nature, sometimes our lives feel as though they could disappear with a single flick. The pandemic reminded us of that very clearly. There may be moments when I cannot see a way forward, but there are still materials in front of me. I still have my hands, my eyes, my memory and my world of images. So instead of remaining inside that helplessness, I work with what is there and try to open a small space in which I can breathe. For me, making art has often been that space.
Looking back at your career so far, are there particular exhibitions, projects, or achievements that you consider important turning points?
There is a period of my career that I consider closed now. During that time, I made and exhibited work about subjects that very few people around me were willing to speak about openly. I took more risks than I probably needed to. I heard the applause, but I also experienced a great deal of betrayal. The first part of my journey ended painfully, with exhaustion and disappointment.
I stopped making art for quite a long time. During that period, I walked through uncertain, narrow streets, speaking to myself, asking questions. Sometimes I found answers and sometimes I didn’t. Eventually I began working again, but something had changed. Over time, my visual language changed with me.
So perhaps the most important turning point in my career was not a particular exhibition or achievement, but the moment when one artistic period ended and, after a long silence, another slowly began.
How has living and working between different cultures and places shaped the way you see yourself as an artist?
When I lived in Turkey, I always wanted to belong. It was a cycle that began in childhood. But I wanted belonging to happen naturally. Whenever I felt that I was expected to speak louder, prove myself more, or perform my belonging in order to be accepted, I became quieter. People who already belonged did not have to shout for it or constantly prove that they deserved their place. I felt that this should have been my right as well. But it wasn’t.
Much of this was connected to being from Diyarbakır. Throughout different periods of my life, including my years as a teacher and as an artist, I became very familiar with the expectation to explain myself more, prove where I stood, or demonstrate my belonging in ways that others were simply not asked to do. Belonging could feel conditional, as though it had to be earned again and again.
After many years in Canada, I began to experience belonging differently. I did not feel that my existence was constantly being examined, or that I had to keep passing tests in order to justify my place. I was not expected to prove myself by declaring who or what I should condemn.
I am still trying to understand exactly how this has changed my work, but perhaps it has allowed me to stop explaining so much. Earlier in my practice, there was a period when my work spoke much more directly and politically. Today I feel less need to declare what an image means or what position it represents. I can allow it to remain uncertain, personal, even unresolved. Maybe feeling less pressure to prove where I belong has also given my work permission simply to exist without constantly having to explain itself.
What do you hope viewers experience when they encounter your work? Is there something you want them to feel, question, or carry with them afterwards?
Perhaps viewers can take a few questions away with them. Maybe something as simple as, “Could I look at this differently?” or “What is missing here?” There may be no answers. Probably there aren’t. But I think some questions are essential.
Life has become terribly lacking in tenderness. Nobody cries at the sight of a horse running anymore. So much absence of compassion makes everything rigid, and I find that rigidity deeply unpleasant. This lack of love feels unfair to the world and to nature itself. And perhaps nature is beginning to object, to throw our “magnificent civilization” back at us.
So maybe what I hope for is some kind of collision with that rigidity: a small disturbance in our lack of tenderness, a question that stays for a while. I don’t need the viewer to arrive at the same answer as I do. I would rather they leave with their own question.
Where do you see your artistic practice going next? Are there any ideas, materials, or directions you are particularly interested in exploring in the future?
I don’t really think about it anymore. I used to make plans for where my work or my life would go, and then life would arrive and beat those plans ten to nil. So now, I honestly don’t know.
Circumstances and time will determine much of what comes next. At this point, my practice feels a little like a tunnel whose end I cannot see. But I am no longer in a hurry to see it. I can keep working, keep looking, and see where it leads. Whatever comes, comes.
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