Özlem Altın works with a vast archive of self-made and found images, including texts, replicas and prints from books, pictures pilfered from magazines or the Internet, artistic material from museum collections, and her own photographs and paintings, which she assembles in multi-layered collages and site-specific installations. While Altın references visual strategies of appropriation and recombination of mass media images and text used throughout 20th century-art history, her own works underscore the narratives and interconnections that occur when disparate pictures are brought into proximity. In these narratives, the body is made central, presented, as the artist has said, “as means for the diffusion of knowledge, experience, communication, and exchange.” Altın’s new work Translucent shield (calling) (2022) is a collage of black-and-white photographs, both found and taken by the artist, printed on white canvas. The collaged imagery includes photographs that Altın took while accompanying her friend in labor and relates either directly or metaphorically to birth, death, and the force and violence of transitions between states of being. Layered with transparent white ink that creates the impression of an over-exposed photograph or an image seen through a porcelain screen, the work confuses inside and outside, creating a visual diagram of the liminal space between life and death.
Madeline Weisburg
