Beyza Turak
Beyza Turak was born in Erzincan in 1999. In 2017, she began her undergraduate studies in the Department of Communication and Design at Bilkent University with a full scholarship and graduated in 2023. During her undergraduate education, she focused on visual communication design, filmmaking, and media relations. In 2022, she participated in the Erasmus exchange program and studied Online Culture: Art, Media and Society at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, focusing on the relationships between digital culture, art, and media.
Following her graduation from Bilkent University, she began her master’s studies in Communication Design and Creative Strategies at Media University of Applied Sciences in Berlin and graduated in 2025. During her graduate studies, she worked as a Communication and Design Assistant at Zilberman Gallery Berlin, contributing to the production of visual and written materials for exhibitions, events, and artist communication.
Berlin, A Place
This exhibition explores how the sense of belonging, shaped by historical and emotional grounds, is experienced and expressed through art by artists living in Berlin.
Berlin is a constantly evolving city where artists from diverse backgrounds come together; a place where cultural transitions and multiple identities intertwine. Historically a border city marked by separation, division, and reunification, Berlin continues to bear the emotional and political traces of its past. This layered memory forms one of the foundations upon which today’s notions of belonging are built and redefined.
This exhibition explores how the sense of belonging—shaped upon this historical and emotional ground—is experienced, transformed, and made visible through the practices of artists living in Berlin. Belonging is not merely about being born into or migrating to a place; it is about making sense of it, building emotional and cultural ties with it. These ties may be broken through forced displacement, reshaped through personal transformation, or consciously rejected. In Berlin, belonging exists as an ongoing negotiation between the past and the present, between individual and collective memory.
These different experiences reveal that belonging is not a fixed or singular identity, but a plural and evolving process shaped by time, place, and individual narratives. The exhibition does not only trace this process through bonds that have been formed with a place, but also through those that remain unsettled, delayed, or questioned. In this context, artistic production becomes not only a way of existing in Berlin, but also a part of the artist’s effort to define themselves, to root, to question, and to claim space. In this context, the exhibition space itself transforms into a site of reflection—where the bonds of belonging can be explored, rethought, and reimagined. This intellectual and emotional search finds expression in the following words:
“Where am I from, really?
I even ask myself and still find no answer.
I feel no attachment, no sense of belonging to any geography or place.” [1]
This quiet and ambiguous reflection resonates with the practices of the artists in this exhibition. For here, belonging does not emerge as a clear answer, but as a continuous act of questioning.
[1] Mustafa Kutlu, Uzun Hikâye [A Long Story], Dergâh Publishing, 2000, p. 18.
(Translated from Turkish by the curator.)