Deniz Aktaş, 1987

Born in 1987 in Diyarbakır, Deniz Aktaş graduated from Marmara University, Faculty of Fine Arts, Department of Painting, in 2010, after which he completed his master’s degree in the Program in Plastic Arts at Yeditepe University, Graduate School of Social Sciences.

Aktaş, who currently lives and works in Diyarbakır, produces paintings employing the techniques of ink pen on paper and digital print collage, and in which he often touches upon urban life through spaces. Working on the memories of spaces, the marks left by humans, or the impermanence of conditions that are built and rebuilt by human hands, Aktaş concentrates on themes of migration and memory, using urban components as his starting point.

Considering how a city that has been built and demolished also becomes the reflection of a memory subjected to forced movement, in his series “Nonspaces” (2017) the artist creates a story-space about the past, using fragments of ruins left after the demolition of a human-made building enveloped by nature. In this series, while Aktaş gives no clues as to the location or the cause of the demolition, he does render visible a kind of mobility that could happen anywhere. The fragments of memory that are forced to change after the raid have merged with nature, showing us the limits of what can be read about transformation, the past, and the future.