Zeynep Yıldız was born on May 8, 2002, in the Fatih district of Istanbul. Shortly after her birth, her family migrated to Germany, where she lived until the age of five. During her high school years, she developed a strong interest in the piano and began to make significant progress. She is currently 23 years old and has been studying Arts and Cultural Management at Istanbul Bilgi University on a full scholarship since 2022, while also pursuing a double major in Psychology.
History has never been merely a sequential accumulation of what has happened. It is also a composition of what has been forgotten, repressed, and continuously reconstructed through different languages.
Modernity‘s narrative of progress legitimizes these processes of reconstruction through the universal principles of reason, science, and objectivity. Yet this legitimacy speaks from within a regime of knowledge that defines, classifies, excludes, and archives. It does not only select what is to be remembered; it also determines what can be imagined.
Under these conditions, intellectual or aesthetic production seeks ways to trace the suppressed, to wander along the limits of conceptual apparatuses. Works that engage with structures such as fiction, memory, archives, and testimony point not so much to truth itself as to the relations through which truth becomes visible. Representation here is not treated as an unquestioned tool, but as a mechanism operating through intricate ties with power.
The Enlightenment subject appears to occupy the center; yet this center is enclosed within a framework determined by norms, rules, and structural constructs. Today, the reduction of political subjectivity to narrow positions such as victim, perpetrator, or witness is no coincidence. To be a subject, however, is not a fixed identity, but a continuously reconstructed, fragmented, and transformable process. This process is concerned not only with the past, but also with what has not yet occurred. Moments in which memory and identity fracture, and time loses its unity, may give rise to the possibility of a new subject.
Power often operates not through overt repression, but by directing modes of perception. Concepts do not merely enable thought; they also delineate its boundaries. For this reason, every form of expression that objectifies the conceptual itself and displaces the authority of language constitutes not only an aesthetic act, but also a political intervention.
Thought shifts only when it is shaken. Everything that lies outside the comfort zone, interrupts speech, or unsettles the gaze can open the way to another kind of meaning, another way of seeing. The breath that seeps out from the familiar often carries the deepest question: Today, with which concepts are we compelled to think, and which ones have yet to be constructed?
“The passion for destruction is also a creative passion.”
-Mikhail Bakunin