Nazli Gurlek-Hodder
Body Is A Portal
Acrylic on unprimed canvas
2020
I am an artist based in Istanbul, Turkey. I am invested in developing an embodied aesthetic that reflects the here and now of authentic life experiences in order to speak of freedoms, agency, resistance and empowerment. My mediums are painting, performance, and installation art. Through instinctively structured rituals I explore material, emotional and spiritual dimensions of the body together with themes such as birth, death, creation, alchemy, mythology, ecology, healing, resilience and the unconscious.
I combine elements from Anatolian and Central Asian shamanic cultures with art, dance and psycho therapy techniques and archaic symbolisms. The resulting works bear witness to the potential of the body as an inconsistent and vulnerable artifact, with leaky boundaries in constant continuation and flow with the rest of life surrounding it. Questions of my practice concern eco-feminism, oneness of the earth’s body and the human body, and art as a tool for healing and resistance.
