Selen Özcan
Selen Özcan was born in Istanbul on June 22,1996, where she currently lives and works. She completed her higher educationat Istanbul University, Department of Classical Philology (Ancient GreekLanguage and Literature). During her studies, she took courses in art history,strengthening her academic background through an interdisciplinary engagementwith art.
Recognizing that cultural heritage should notremain solely an object of study, she developed a strong interest in itspreservation, exhibition, and public visibility. Her growing awareness of theimportance of storytelling within exhibition-making led her to explore multiplenarrative forms and creative modes of expression. This process directed hertoward design-oriented practices, narrative strategies, and spatial thinking inexhibition contexts.
She is currently continuing her studies inCultural Heritage and Tourism at Istanbul University, while also pursuing adegree in Visual Communication Design at Anadolu University in order to furtherdevelop her design-driven approach to cultural production. After completing aninternship at Galeri/Miz in Teşvikiye, Istanbul, she continues her practicethrough independent projects.
Practices of Selfhood
This exhibition explores the shifting nature of the self, where identity once seen as stable is continuously re‑formed through social and digital processes.
“The self is no longer something to be inhabited, but a project to be made, designed, and constantly updated.”
— Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Life
This exhibition moves along the boundaries of that variable structure we call the self. Once imagined as stable, unified, and coherent, the “self” has today become a state of becoming—one that seeps into social formations and digital trajectories alike. Who we are is no longer something to be remembered, but something that must be designed. Practices of Selfhood investigates the fragility, resilience, and ghostly nature of this design process.
We begin with Zygmunt Bauman’s definition of liquid modernity: in an age where identity is no longer a fixed form acquired once and for all, but a temporary profile that requires constant updating, the self emerges as a continuously reconstructed process. Identity is no longer something that is given; it is a task. Surveillance no longer operates solely from the outside—it is internalized as a form of self-monitoring and self-discipline. We look at ourselves, but through the eyes of others.
The works in this exhibition are situated within the compressed space between the construction of the subject and the possibility of its liberation. Following Gilles Deleuze’s call in Ethics of Selfhood, the self is approached not as a fixed essence, but as a machine of difference production. Through Deleuze’s concept of becoming, the self is always something other than itself: a child, an animal, a sound, a scratch, a voice recording, a silence.
Borrowing from J. Edwards’ The Origins of Self, the self can be understood as a process that emerges through affective choreographies with the environment from infancy onward—shaped by neurobiological traces and socialized through language. Within this framework, each work in the exhibition becomes an affective trace: remembered, erased, coded, uploaded, corrupted.
The exhibition invites the viewer to reflect on the following questions:
- Did I choose my identity?
- When what makes me “me” disappears, what remains?
- Is freedom possible within a surveilled self?
- Is self-knowledge an illusion?
Throughout the exhibition, we witness that what we call “I” is not a singular entity, but rather a composite of multiplicity, contradiction, and temporary agreements negotiated with time and context.
Rather than offering a definitive answer to the question “Who am I?”, this exhibition seeks to present the aesthetic, political, and affective forms of being exposed to the question itself.